Colonial Towns of Spanish and Portuguese America

Abstract

IN THE TWO centuries between 1500 and 1700 six European nations established towns and colonies in the Americas. Of these only Spain laid out towns according to a regular and unvarying plan. This plan represented an orderly practical concept without precedent in the immediate background of Europe. It involved not only the careful consideration of the site the standpoint of terrain and climate but also the introduction of a gridiron plan of broad straight streets intersecting one another at right angles to form rectangular blocks and open squares. The plan was the result of a number of royal orders first codified in 1523 at the time of the conquest of Mexico and incorporated in what are known as the Laws of the Indies, which were followed in all subsequent Spanish colonization until the end of the colonial period.' The gridiron plan, used in Mesopotamia and in ancient Egyptian cities, had been the standard scheme for plotting Graeco-Roman cities. It was almost entirely abandoned, however, in medieval times in favor of an irregular system of crooked streets and uneven spaces that obeyed a very different kind of planning. The revival of the gridiron in Spanish America was, therefore, a revival of a commonplace of antiquity and as such is characteristic of the Renaissance. It was also one of the outstanding American contributions to the history of urbanism because the revival of the gridiron plan took place in the new world before it became accepted in Europe. Before the conquest of Mexico one important urban site had been laid out in Spanish America. This was the town of Santo Domingo on Columbus' island of Hispaniola, the modern Ciudad Trujillo, capital of the Dominican Republic, which was founded in 1496. King Ferdinand, writing to his military governor Nicolas de Ovando, said that from here it is not possible to give precise instructions and left to the governor himself the responsibility of determining the plan to be followed.2 The one that was adopted on the spot is, however, related to the whole subsequent development because it includes a number of regular arteries running parallel a principal square containing the cathedral and city hall and umber of less regular open spaces with their respective churches.3 The result was sufficiently impressive to lead the Italian bishop Geraldini upon his arrival at Santo Domingo in 1520 to commend the streets as broader and straighter than those of his native Florence. In contriving this plan it is probable that the soldier Ovando and his associates were less concerned with the theory of an ideal city than with the recollection of a hastily contrived but efficiently laid-out military camp which some of them had known. This was the temporary castrum of Santa FK, which Ferdinand and Isabella had created in two and one-half months in 1491 in order to launch the successful siege of Granada which drove the last Moors Spain. Santa Fe was drawn up as a fortified rectangle intersected by the crossing of two perpendicular axes and approached by four cardinal gates. Santo Domingo was provided with walls for defence marauders approaching by sea and was thus the forerunner of all the subsequent heavily fortified Spanish strongholds of the Antilles and the Gulf of Mexico.