Santo Domingo: the first European city in the Americas

Built beginning in 1512, the Primada Cathedral of the Americas was the first cathedral raised in the New World.

A few steps away, one walks on Calle Las Damas, considered the oldest paved street in the Americas, its name recalling the court ladies who walked there in groups in the evenings according to the custom of the time.

Continuing, one reaches the Alcázar of Diego Colón, a 16th-century residence of the admiral's son, today a museum with period furnishings from the viceregal era and a direct view over the Ozama River.

Towards evening, the Colonial Quarter, a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1990, comes alive with music and restaurants among the very same stones walked by the first Spanish colonists.

Walking down Calle Las Damas means literally retracing the first urban street ever planned by Europeans in the American continent, decades before the founding of any other colonial city.

Diego Colón's Alcázar was abandoned for centuries and reduced to ruins before a twentieth-century restoration that restored its original sixteenth-century appearance.