The classical model of the Spanish-American colonial city [Martínez, René]

IntroductionOne of the universally accepted principles of Spanish-American town planning history is the fact that citieswere founded according to definite rules previouslyestablished by the Crown, namely Charles V in 1523,which were put into practice by the local Spanishadelantado, captain, conquistador, or whatever histitle may have been. This ‘fact’, according to long-established tradition, is held to explain by itself theformal planimetric unity of the primitive layout ofcities and the existence of identical cities in places sowide apart as Mérida in Mexico and Osorno insouthern Chile (Fig. 1). Starting with the foundationof Santo Domingo (1502) by Nicolas de Ovando inLa Española (now the Dominican Republic), a nearly

unique pattern of cities, the ‘chessboard plan’extended into the New World as long as theconqueror’s advance was in need of permanentsettlements in which to dwell, and to defend or toconsolidate the conquest.

From the nineteenth century to our times, his-torians have accepted with no doubts whatsoeverthat the foundation of cities from the fifteenthcentury onwards was the result of a clear founda-tional policy through the systematic application ofa consistent body of legal dispositions: the ‘Leyesde Indias para Poblaciones’ (‘The Laws of theIndies’). Barros Arana and other classic Chileanhistorians state, in very similar words, with refer-ence to the city of Santiago:

11112311145678910111123456789201111234567893011112345111

1111

The classical model of theSpanish-American colonial city

René Martínez Lemoine

From the sixteenth century onwards, a unique pattern is used in the layout of cities inSpanish-America: the chessboard plan. The uniformity and extent of the model’s use, fromCalifornia to the Straits of Magellan, has been attributed to the provisions of the ‘Laws ofthe Indies’, specifically the Charter of 1523, from the Emperor Charles V. The paper proposesthat the chessboard model derives, not from a particular piece of legislation dictated a quarterof 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 markedlydifferent from the contemporary experience of the mediaeval town and, in the specificallySpanish case, intricate arabic patterns, became the paradigmatic example of ‘the new city inthe New World’. Santo Domingo was, in the early sixteenth century, the administrative capitalof that world. Every captain, or plain soldier, in search of fame and fortune – or more preciselygold – arrived in and departed from Santo Domingo, the new and extraordinary modern citywith wide and straight streets, an experience unknown to the average person of thesixteenth 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.

According to the general practice introduced inAmerica by the Royal Charter of 1523, the site-plan was divided into squares 150 ‘varas’ longseparated by streets 12 ‘varas’ wide. [Vara: similarto the English yard, equalling 0.87 metres.]

More recently, Palm (1951), Guarda (1957), Kubler(1964), Benevolo (1968), Hardoy (1968), Gasparini(1968) and Zawizsa (1972), have maintained thesame opinion:

Once upon a time there was a wise king . . .!Curiously enough there is no mention of any legalbasis for the foundation of cities by those writerswho were to a great extent the witnesses of thefoundational process. Pedro Cieza de Leon, whoarrived in the Americas in 1531, was the author of‘Crónica del Perú’, in which he describes in full

detail the foundation of cities such as Panamá , SanSebastian, Antioquía, Cártago, Cali, Pasto, Plata,Quito, Guayaquil, Loja, Lima, San Miguel and LaPaz: he knows nothing or states nothing about anylegal dispositions. Francisco López de Gomara, theauthor of a monumental ‘Historia General de lasIndias’ (1551) tells us about the foundation of adozen cities, completely ignoring any possibility ofa defined legal procedure.

Juan López de Velasco, the author of ‘Geografíay Descripción Universal de las Indias’ (1576) andAntonio Vásquez de Espinoza, the author of‘Compendio y Descripción de las Indias Orientales’(1600), both works to be considered completecensuses of Spanish America with references tothousands of towns, cities and villages, give no hintsas to the legal basis of the foundational process.According to López de Velasco, by 1574 there weremore than 200 cities, 3500 Indian settlements, andmore than 9000 Indian villages, not counting somescores which had been destroyed, depopulated,transferred to another site or simply disappearedfrom the ground and memory.

All this splendid, unparalleled flourishing ofurbanisation built up in a few decades, less thana century, was due, if we believe in the theory ofthe wise king, to the systematic application of theCharter of 1523. However, this interpretationmust be re-examined, not only because of theexistence of notorious chronological contradic-tions between the foundation of cities and thepromulgation of the correspondent law, but alsobecause of fundamental differences to be foundbetween the primitive Spanish-American ‘chess-board’ and the law itself. There seems to be no

11112345678910111123456789201111234567893011112345111

Figure 1. General map ofSpanish America.

440 The classical model of the Spanish-American colonial city

real evidence that the 1523 Charter was everknown, put into practice or published in theAmericas. (In fact, it was never published, apartfrom the copy sent to somewhere in the Americas,probably to Santo Domingo, the original being atthe ‘Consejo de Indias’ in Seville.)

Up to the definitive organisation of the ‘Consejode Indias’ in 1524, any law, instruction, Charter orordinance concerning the administration of theNew World was sent in the original to the colonyconcerned. Later on, it was ordered that originalsshould be kept at the Consejo, a copy being sentto the particular place for which it was intended,with instructions for registration in chronologicalorder. This procedure led in a short time to a mostconfusing situation, not only at the Consejo itself,but in each one of the emerging countries. Early inthe sixteenth century the number of legal disposi-tions was such that there was not, even at theConsejo, any idea of how to cope with thousandsand thousands of mixed, contradictory, never usedor replaced dispositions, most of them being validfor a particular place or for a definite problem in adefinite place.

Even by the end of the seventeenth century therewas nothing resembling an organic, systematic,complete code for the government of the NewWorld. The Laws of the Indies were a completemess, a dictionary in no alphabetical order, many ofwhose rules were in no order or had never been putinto practice. In 1550 the Viceroy, Luis de Velasco,had given orders to compile and put in order thedispositions which had been received in NuevaEspaña throughout thirty years. This was, it seems,the beginning of a long process which took more

than a hundred years to compile, organise andpublish a complete code for the administration ofthe vast Spanish empire. The ‘Recopilacion de Leyesde Indias’ was published in 1680. Up to that datethere were several attempts to codify the existinglegislation, including some which originated inNueva España and Perú. The first of these compila-tions was published in 1563 in Mexico by Vasco dePuga, including all the dispositions received in thatAudiencia from 1525 onwards, that is to say, it didnot include the 1523 Charter.

The history of the compilation of the Laws of theIndies is a story in its own right. For our purpose,it is enough to mention that the first successfulattempt was due to Diego de Encinas, an obscuresecretary at the ‘Consejo de Indias’, who workedon his own account for more than twenty years.This compilation, published in 1596 under the title‘Cedulario Indiano’, includes all the legal disposi-tions which were in force by the end of thesixteenth century, omitting all those which were notin use or had been revoked. The 1523 Charter isnot included in the Cedulario!

The ‘Recopilación de Leyes de losReinos de Indias’The publication of the ‘Compilation of the Indies’in 1680 constitutes the final effort to clarify andcomplete the confused legal situation of nearly twohundred years of administration. In fact, the‘Recopilación . . .’ constitutes the first systematicbody of legal dispositions to be considered as acomplete code for the whole vast and distantSpanish domain. To a great extent it is the Spanish-American counterpart of the ‘Siete Partidas’ which

11112345678910111123456789201111234567893011112345111

René Martínez Lemoine 441

Don Alfonso, the ‘wise king’ gave to mediaevalSpain.

The ‘Recopilación . . .’, being an effort to codifyand to modernise obsolete procedures, is not a realcompilation in the sense of including every legalitem ever introduced. On the contrary, it excludeseverything out of use or never used, reformulatingand unifying thousands of legal dispositions. Fromthis point of view, it is not the best or most trust-worthy basis for historical interpretation as there isno evidence whatsoever that one is using the orig-inal version of the law. In this respect, the‘Cedulario Indiano’ is far more useful as it gives thefull extent and original text of the law.

There are other problems in dealing with the‘Recopilación . . .’ as a document for the periodprior to 1680, that is, the uncertainty of its chrono-logical process and the generalisation of its dispo-sitions. The law was primarily intended for aparticular situation in a particular place and thereis very little which could be considered equally validfor such places as the Audiencia of Guatemala, theReino of Quito, the Capitanía General of Chile or,for that matter, the Philippine Islands. Yet, present-day historians have considered the ‘Recopilación .. .’ as the source of a specific foundational policyand of a formalistic and unitarian intentionregarding the disposition of the town plan for thecolonial city. This belief derives from the modifiedversion of the ‘Recopilación . . .’, which is a combi-nation of the 1523 Charter and the Ordinance of1573.

The modified version of 1573 includes what isperhaps the most famous and quoted passage inthe town planning history of the Americas:

At the time of making the plan of the place, itmust be divided by its squares, passages and plotsby means of cord and ruler, beginning from themain square and taking the passages out from itto the gates and principal roadways, leavingenough open space to continue in the samemanner, in case the population should greatlyincrease. (The Emperor Don Carlos, 1523.)And that is all. These few lines, which are the only

ones to be found in relation to the foundation ofcities in a mixed, disorderly, and almost inexhaustiblelegislative provision, according to long-establishedbelief, constitute the basis or the origin of theSpanish-American gridiron. This is hard to believe!

The primitive layoutAccording to López de Velasco, by the end of thefirst quarter of the sixteenth century, there were atleast fifty new cities extending from Mexico toColombia and Venezuela. From the foundation ofLa Isabela (1493) and the first Santo Domingo(1496) with spontaneous or irregular plans, thesecond Santo Domingo (1502) and La Havana(1511) with semi-regular patterns, to the complexorthogonal plan of Panamá La Vieja (1518) and theregular plan of Veracruz (1519) in perfect rec-tangles, there is a continuous and sensible evolu-tion towards orthogonality and the perfect gridironplan. From this standpoint, it is quite fair toconsider that the 1523 Charter was the result ofofficial recognition of a real fact; the existence ofa relatively large number of cities built on the chess-board principle prior to 1523.

Guarda (1965), Benévolo (1968) and others haveconsidered that the origin of the classical model of

11112345678910111123456789201111234567893011112345111


American cities lies in the spontaneous introductionof mediaeval models for fortified cities in theRoman manner:

The regular plan, ‘more romano’, was faithfullytransmitted through mediaeval times by the artof castramentation which was carefully codifiedby Don Alonso X, el Sabio, in the Second of his‘Siete Partidas’. In Navarra, Levante, Castilla,Vascongadas, Andalucía, from the twelfth to thesixteenth centuries, a number of regular foun-dations were established which are older thanthe well-known French bastides.

However, by their proximity to the Spanish-American foundations it is of the greatestinterest to recall the ones created by the CatholicKings, culminating in 1491 with the foundationof Santa Fe de Granada.1

From here to the Americas there is but a smallstep which is covered by Nicolás de Ovando, awitness of the foundation of Santa Fe, and thedelineator of the regular plan of Santo Domingoin 1502. (Fig. 2.)

Santo Domingo, the first Spanish-American ‘chessboard’If Santo Domingo is the result of a simple trans-position of a mediaeval model to the New World,it is certainly not the result of a legal dispositionestablished by the ‘wise king’. What is perfectlyclear, according to the ‘Instrucciones . . .’ given toOvando, is that there were no instructions at all:

Item: Being also necessary to establish newsettlements in La Española, and as it not possibleto give any directions from here, you must seeto the places and sites of the said Island, together

with the quality of the land and people, and youmust see to the establishment of new settle-ments in the number and places you consider tobe appropriate. (Instrucciones al CommendadorOvando, 1501. Colección de Documentosinéditos de Indias.)

According to this text, one has to agree that hewas a wise king after all!

NO-INSTRUCTIONS-FROM-HEREFernández de Oviedo, the sixteenth century his-torian, refers to the layout of the city, attributing itto the personal intervention of Ovando:

All houses in Santo Domingo are built of stoneas those in Barcelona, but the layout is muchbetter than that of Barcelona as the streets ofSanto Domingo are flat and wide and, with no

11112345678910111123456789201111234567893011112345111

Figure 2. Santa Fe deGranada (Spain). Foundedby the Catholic Kings in1492. Taken from García,B., ‘Resúmen histórico delUrbanismo en España’(Madrid, 1968).


comparison, much straighter. As the city wasfounded in our times, by means of compass andruler, with all the streets to the same measure, itmakes great advantage to any other city I haveseen’.2

The city became famous for the quality of its build-ings and the ‘modernity’ of its layout. Travellers,chroniclers, historians and cartographers who lefttheir impressions of the city are unanimous inpraising the regularity of the plan which was in factso utterly different from their own European ex-perience of the mediaeval or Islamic city. (Fig. 3.)

Geraldini, the first Bishop of Santo Domingo,describes enthusiastically his first vision of the city:

I was astonished at the sight of such an illus-trious city, its buildings being as imposing andbeautiful as those of Italy, its very streets so wide

and straight that they can compare advanta-geously to those of Florence.

The poet Castellanos wrote in 1535:Está su población tan compasadaque ninguna se yo mejor trazada

That is:The city is so regularly measuredthat I know of no other so well traced

It is clear then that contemporaries considered thecity to be perfectly regular; or, as Oviedo said: ‘Allthe streets are the same measure’.

The reality is substantially different. The plan of thecity is formed by five or six streets from east to westand seven from north to south maintaining a certainparallelism and giving way to trapezoidal blocks. Thecity projects an image of perfect regularity to whichit would be possible to apply the description AlonsoOvalle gave of Santiago de Chile in 1646:

The plan of the city gives no advantage to anyother, as it was traced by means of compass andruler in the manner of a chessboard . . . the blackand white squares being what we call there‘quadras’ which are, all of them of the sameshape and size, in such a way, that there is noone bigger than any other and they are perfectsquares, from which follows that any manstanding in the crossing of two streets can seenorth, south, east, and west with no impedi-ments to sight.3 (Fig. 4).

This same vision appears time and again in alldescriptions of Santo Domingo in such a way thatits ‘image’ becomes the idealised model of theSpanish-American city.

There is no information concerning other citiesfounded in the first quarter of the century. The

11112345678910111123456789201111234567893011112345111

Figure 3. Santo Domingoin La Española (now theDominican Republic).Founded by Nicolás deOvando in 1502. Takenfrom F. Chueca and L. Torres, ‘Planos deciudades Iberoamericanas yFilipinas’ (Madrid, 1951).


primitive layouts of the cities founded by Alonso deHojeda and Diego de Nicuesa in Castilla del Oroand Veragua, Ponce de León in Puerto Rico, Diegode Velásquez in Cuba, Juan de Esquivel in Jamaica,all of them from 1508 to 1514, have disappeared.‘There is no memory of what they were . . .’ saysLópez de Velasco. All these expeditions departedfrom Santo Domingo, so it is fair to think that it ispossible that they would have applied the ‘model’

deriving from the idealisation of the primitive gridof that city. Palm suggests that the foundations byRodrigo de Bastidas and Juan de Ampués inVenezuela, must have followed the same model, asboth were former ‘vecinos’ or residents of SantoDomingo.4

‘Instructions’ prior to 1523The importance attributed to the Charter of 1523has obscured a number of ‘Instructions . . .’ whichthe Spanish Crown gave to Pedrarias Dávila in1523, Diego de Velásquez in 1518, Francisco deGaray in 1521 and Hernán Cortés in 1523. Withslight variations in the text, all of them followapproximately the same pattern:

. . . the distribution of sites should be made inorder in such a way that once the houses arebuilt the village should look orderly, be it in theplace assigned for the square and the church asin the proper order of the streets.

In places which are to be built, it is good totrace them in order from the beginning, so theywill remain in order but those not following thesedispositions will never be in order.

The Spanish text repeats the word ‘order’ six timesin eight lines in a most clear manifestation of inten-tions which in no case are definite or precise. Inpractice, this type of ‘order’ can be interpreted indifferent ways. For Pedrarias Davila ‘order’ meansa mixture of different squares and rectangles ofdifferent sizes like the ones forming the plan ofPanamá la Vieja founded in 1519. (Fig. 5.)Undoubtedly we are still far from the perfect chess-board typifyng the classical model of the Spanish-American colonial city.

11112345678910111123456789201111234567893011112345111

Figure 4. Santiago, Chile.The extended image of thechessboard. Taken fromAlonso de Ovalle,‘Historical Relation of theKingdom of Chile’ (Rome,1646). English versionpublished in theseventeenth century.


The alarife (surveyor) García Bravo, companion toPedrarias in Panamá, was later in Mexico withCortes participating in the foundation of Veracruz,México, and Campeche, in rectangular grids whichare the characteristic of Mexican colonial cities inthe sixteenth century, all of them prior to 1523.(Fig. 6.) From the rectangular grid to the classicalmodel there is but a small step. In the founding ofGranada, Santiago de León and Bruselas inNicaragua by Francisco de Hernández as ‘comi-sionado’ of Pedrarias, the lay outs of the citiesfollowed the model of Panamá la Vieja accordingto the ‘Instrucciones . . .’ of 1513. These cities were

founded in 1523 and 1524. Archaeological findingsin Santiago de León show a regular grid and acentral plaza as a perfect square.

The foundation of Guatemala by Alvarado , acommissioner of Cortes, in 1524, was madeaccording to the ‘Old Book’, the ‘Libro Viejo de laFundación’:

with four plots in the centre of the lay out formingthe plaza of the city, and with streets running fromnorth to south and east to west . . .

Should it be suspected that Alvarado was aware ofthe existence of the Charter of 1523, it is neces-sary to point out that he had been for four yearsin complete isolation fighting indians and mosqui-toes in the plains and jungles of Nicaragua.)

From Santo Domingo to Santiago de losCaballeros de Guatemala, or, from Ovando toAlvarado, covering the whole period previous tothe Charter of 1523, some fifty cities were foundednot including some twenty others which had beenabandoned or destroyed. In all these foundations itis not possible to trace any signs of ‘continuity’ or

11112345678910111123456789201111234567893011112345111

Figure 5. Panamá la vieja. Founded by PedrariasDávila in 1519. Taken from‘Monumentos históricos yarqueológicos’ (Instituto deGeografía e Historia,México, 1950).


Figure 6. a) Campeche,México, 1608. Theidealised image of thechessboard. Founded byHernán Cortés in 1541.b) Campeche, Mexico,1751. The real plan. (Both plans in F. Chueca,op. cit.)

of the eventual rising of a Spanish-American tradi-tion deriving from a sort of foundationalcontinuum.

Practically all these foundations are related in oneway or another to the ‘Instrucciones . . .’ given toPedrarias, Garay, Velásquez and Cortés, which wereput into practice according to the particular inter-pretation of each one of them. This is better under-stood if we consider that Hernández, acommissioner of Pedrarias, proceeding fromPanama, establishes a regular layout quite differentfrom that city, and Alvarado, a commissioner ofCortés, makes his own ‘square’ chessboard againstthe rectangular grid of the latter. The result is a sortof spontaneous, primitive, experimental chessboardwhich begins to take its definitive form, the ‘clas-sical model’, with the foundation of Santiago deLeón (Nicaragua) and Guatemala, and whichreaches absolute regularity in Lima (1535), Santiagode Chile (1541) and Buenos Aires (1536). (Fig. 7.)

In all these cases, the only visible link is thepersonal experience of each one of the ‘conquis-tadores’ with Santo Domingo, the first and spec-tacular city of the New World: ‘much better thanBarcelona’, ‘giving no advantage to Florence’, ‘noother so well laid out . . .’. It must be rememberedthat Santo Domingo, as the administrative capitalof the Antillas, was the arrival and departure pointfor the Americas and the place from which everysingle expedition departed. Thus, the nearly regularchessboard delineated by Ovando becomes theidealised model of the ‘modern’ city in the NewWorld, a model which will be recognised and madeofficial by successive legislative actions.

From 1523 to 1573 and onwardsWe have stated that there is no evidence that theCharter of 1523 was ever published or applied inAmerica. On the contrary, its real value may bededuced from the fact that it is not even mentionedin a series of ‘Instrucciones . . .’ and ‘ Capitulaciones. . .’ given to Rodrigo de Bastidas in 1525, FranciscoPizarro in 1529, Pedro de Heredia in 1533, Pedrode Mendoza in 1534 and Alvarez de Toledo in 1568.These ‘Capitulaciones . . .’ led to the foundation ofat least Santa Marta (1525), Cartagena (1533), Lima(1535) and Buenos Aires (1536). (Fig. 8.)

The text of the ‘Capitulaciones . . .’ is very similarin all cases. The one given to Pizarro runs like this:

Item: We give our consent for you to build, inagreement with our captains, a number of fourfortresses in the sites and places which will beconsidered to be most appropriate or convenient.Neighbours and settlers are to be given lands andplots in relation to their position, according to

11112345678910111123456789201111234567893011112345111

Figure 7. Santiago de losCaballeros, 1776(Guatemala). A curiouspre-plan which was laidout in the traditionalmanner and not as amixed chessboard. From F. Chueca, op. cit.


what has been done and it is done in the saidisland of Santo Domingo.5

It is therefore clear enough that in these capitula-ciones there are no specific references to the foun-dation of cities or any specific rules for the layingout of a regular plan. On this basis one has to reachthe conclusion that the King himself had forgotteneverything about his own Charter.6

The ‘Ordenanzas de Poblaciones’ of 1573The definitive code for the foundation of cities inthe Americas comes from Don Felipe II in 1573,under the title ‘Ordinance for New Discoveries,Conquests and Pacifications’. According to Lópezde Velasco there were more than 200 cities existingin Spanish America by that date. The classicalmodel had already reached its perfection and ruledoverwhelmingly as the only pattern of foundationsfrom California to southern Chile. The new legisla-tion, however, begins by ignoring the established

situation and pretends to impose a new layout orig-inating in a rectangular square:

The ‘Plaza Mayor’ from which the city is to bedelineated... must be laid in such a form that itslength should be one and a half times its width. . . considering that the place may go in greatincrease, it should be at least 300 feet long and200 feet wide, 800 feet long and 532 feet wideand it should be of medium and good propor-tion if it takes 600 feet long and 400 feet wide’.(Fig. 9.)

11112345678910111123456789201111234567893011112345111

Figure 8. Mendoza(Argentina). Foundationplan by Pedro del Castilloin 1561. Taken from T.Thayer Ojeda, ‘Lasantiguas ciudades deChile’ (Santiago, 1911).

Figure 9. The Plaza Mayor,according to theOrdinances of 1573. Takenfrom R. Alegría, ‘Historiade la ciudad de la Serena’(Universidad de Chile,1960).


It is beyond the scope of this paper to analyse indetail other contradictory items of the new legisla-tion. It must be said, however, that contrary to theCharter of 1523, which was never published,remaining in its codex form, written with goose-quill pen and intricate sixteenth century hand-writing, the ‘Ordenanzas . . .’ were effectivelypublished and diffused. Official documents veryoften quote its dispositions in relation to the foun-dation of cities. It is, therefore, quite surprising thatin spite of its real and objective diffusion, this defin-itive legislation makes no changes in the estab-lished Spanish-American tradition.7 The ‘classicalmodel’, in perfect chessboard form, continues tobe, practically to our own days, the sole and onlyorganising principle of the Spanish-American city.

The image of the cityIn the course of this article, emphasis has been laidupon the visual and mental aspects which havesupposedly led to a process of ‘cultural transmis-sion’ in the development of the Spanish-Americanchessboard. The ‘modern’ situation represented bythe long, wide and straight streets of SantoDomingo, crossing at (apparently) right angles andleaving an open view in all four directions, culmi-nates in creating a mental image of the Spanish-American city, a ‘public’ image according to KevinLynch. This public image is, up to the present day,the authentic symbol of the city in the Americas.For every one of us, citizens of a quadrangularworld, the square plaza and the square blocks arethe means by which we understand and organiseour urban environment, the module and the modelof what is meant by ‘city’.

The object ‘city’ does not always present thesame definite and distinctive characteristics, but themental model has acquired identity and consistencythrough a long process of internal assimilation.Thus, the extended image of the chessboard tendsto be assimilated to reality through the patternalready internalised by the observer. In this way theimage of the regularity of cities extends far beyondits real existence. Geographers, cartographers andengineers ‘see’chessboards everywhere in theAmericas in such a way that planimetrical accuracygives way to the idealised image of the chessboard.

For instance Frezier in 1712, and John Miers in1825 leave idealised plans of the city of Santiagoaccording to their ‘previous’ idea of regularity (Fig.10, a) and b)). In the same way, a number of semi-regular cities such as Havana (1519), Santiago ofCuba (1519), Quito (1534), Campeche (1542),Valdivia (1556) are praised for their regularity, itbeing obvious that for practical and visual purposesapparent parallelism is as effective as real parallelism(Fig. 11).

11112345678910111123456789201111234567893011112345111

Figure 10. a) Santiago,Chile, 1825. Plan of theCity of Santiago. Takenfrom John Miers, ‘Travelsin Chile and La Plata’(London, 1826).


The extended image of the chessboard goes asfar as to culminate in a series of plans of differentcities showing extensions of squared blockssurpassing the real extension of the city. AlonsoOvalle shows the city of Santiago in 1646 as having288 blocks (Fig.4), while Frezier, sixty-six years later,shows only 88 blocks, which apparently are also too

much for the epoch . . . Joseph Bermudez drew aplan of Buenos Aires in 1708 showing 148 squareblocks while Charlevoix in 1756 gives less than 30!(Fig. 12, a) and b).)

The number of examples is practically endless.The classical model becomes a sort of mentalheritage, a planimetrical habit which will continueto rule successive foundations even towards thebeginning of the twentieth century.

The ‘Plaza Mayor’The most important feature of the ‘public image’is the Plaza, that empty square in the middle of thecity. It constitutes, at the same time, the landmarkof the city, its focal point and the synthesis of theurban condition. If it were not for the Plaza, there

11112345678910111123456789201111234567893011112345111

Figure 10. b) Santiago,Chile, 1831. The real plan.In Claudio Gay, ‘Atlas dela historia de Chile’ (Paris,1834).

Figure 11. La Havana,Cuba. Founded by Diegode Velasquez in 1519.Taken from J.N Belin, ‘LePetit Atlas Maritime’ (Paris,1756).


Figure 12. a) Buenos Aires,Argentina. The idealisedplan by J. Bermudez(1708). Taken fromChueca, op. cit.

would be no order or recognisable structure in theundifferentiated chessboard. We, in SpanishAmerica, understand the city, any city, beginningfrom the central, empty square. We ‘know’ that acity is a pattern of streets crossing at right angles.We ‘know’ that in the centre of the pattern thereis a block missing, an empty square, and we knowthat around this empty square we will always findthe Cathedral, the Municipal Building, the PostOffice, the Central governmental offices, the Bankor, at least a Bank, and the main Hotel. This issimply a ‘fact’, something that is in the naturalorder of things. . . . (Fig. 13).

The Plaza and the activities taking place in it arethe most important clues for our understanding ofthe city, the place from which we derive our knowl-edge of the city and from which we learn how touse the rest of it. From this point of view, the ‘Plaza’is an abstract concept which is even previous to theknowledge and use of the city, a sort of mentalheritage but, better still, a veritable cultural featurewhich is utterly and definitively linked to the veryconcept of urban order and urban activity in theAmericas.

Notes1. Guarda, Gabriel: ‘Santo Tomas de Aquino y las

fuentes del urbanismo indiano’ (Santiago,1965).

2. Fernández de Oviedo, Gonzalo: ‘Sumario de laNatural Historia de las Indias’ (Seville, 1526).

3. Ovalle, Alonso de: Histórica Relación del Reinode Chile (Rome, 1646).

4. Palm, E. Walter: ‘El urbanismo imperial enAmérica’ (México 1951).

5. Prescott, William: ‘Historia de la Conquista delPeru’ (Ed. Suma, Buenos Aires, 1944).

6. Encinas, Diego de, ‘Cedulario Indiano’ (Seville,1596; Instituto de Cultura Hispanica, Madrid,1945).

7. Recopilación de Leyes de los Reinos de Indias(Seville, 1690; Consejo de la Hispanidad,Madrid, 1943).

11112345678910111123456789201111234567893011112345111

Figure 12. b) Buenos Aires,Argentina. The real plan byA. Charlevoix in 1776.Taken from Berin, op. cit.


11112345678910111123456789201111234567893011112345111

Figure 13. The PlazaMayor, Santiago, Chile(seventeenth century).Taken from Cesar Famin,‘Amerique Meridionale’(Paris, 1840).


Documents

The classical model of the Spanish-American colonial city [Martínez, René]