The classical model of the Spanish-American colonial city

Abstract

From the sixteenth century onwards, a unique pattern is used in the layout of cities in Spanish-America: the chessboard plan. The uniformity and extent of the model's use, from California to the Straits of Magellan, has been attributed to the provisions of the 'Laws of the Indies', specifically the Charter of 1523, from the Emperor Charles V. The paper proposes that the chessboard model derives, not from a particular piece of legislation dictated a quarter of a century after the first Spanish-American city was founded, but from the 'idealised image' of Santo Domingo, a city founded by Nicolas de Ovando in 1502. Its regular plan, so markedly different from the contemporary experience of the mediaeval town and, in the specifically Spanish case, intricate arabic patterns, became the paradigmatic example of 'the new city in the New World'. Santo Domingo was, in the early sixteenth century, the administrative capital of that world. Every captain, or plain soldier, in search of fame and fortune - or more precisely gold - arrived in and departed from Santo Domingo, the new and extraordinary modern city with wide and straight streets, an experience unknown to the average person of the sixteenth century. Thus the extended and idealised image of the chessboard represented, apparently, by this city, became the 'modern way' for the lay out of cities in Spanish America.