Santo Domingo

Is Santo Domingo the oldest European city in the Americas?

Yes, as the oldest one that survived. Spanish settlers first built on the east bank of the Ozama River in 1496. Bartholomew Columbus, Christopher’s brother, founded the town formally in 1498, and in 1502 Governor Nicolás de Ovando moved it to the west bank, laying out straight streets around a main square. That grid became a pattern for Spanish towns all over the Americas.

Columbus had founded an earlier town, La Isabela, on the north coast in 1493, but archaeologists show it was in ruins within five years. So Santo Domingo is the oldest permanent European city in the Americas, not the very first.

It collected many other firsts: the first cathedral in the Americas (built 1514 to 1542), the first hospital, customs house and university, and the oldest archbishopric, the church province led by an archbishop. Here the Dominican friar Antonio de Montesinos preached that the island’s Indigenous people had rights. The Taíno, who lived on Hispaniola before the Spanish came, died in huge numbers in the early 1500s from forced labour, hunger and new diseases, though Taíno words, foods and ancestry live on in Dominican life today.

Don’t mix it up with Saint-Domingue, the French colony in the west of the same island, which became Haiti. Its great port was Cap-Français.

Why was Santo Domingo a poor backwater by 1715?

After a boom in the 1500s, the colony slowly declined. War made things worse. In January 1586 the English commander Francis Drake captured the city, held it for about a month and burned much of it, leaving with a ransom of 25,000 ducats and several hundred hides. In April 1655 a large English expedition tried again but was beaten back, and sailed on to take Jamaica instead.

By the late 1600s the island had sunk into general poverty. An archbishop’s count of 1681 found only about 6,300 people in the Spanish colony. The garrison depended on the situado, a yearly subsidy of silver shipped from Mexico from 1683, which often arrived late and already owed to creditors. Spain sent families from the Canary Islands to fill the empty land, and in 1698 founded the town of San Carlos for them.

The colony lived on cattle. Herds of tame and wild cattle roamed the countryside, and their hides were its main product. Cacao had almost vanished by the 1690s, and only small amounts of tobacco were sent to Spain.

How did Santo Domingo trade with the French next door?

During the 1600s French buccaneers and settlers took over the west of Hispaniola, and at the Peace of Ryswick in 1697 Spain accepted their colony in practice. Spanish law still forbade trading with them, but the two colonies needed each other. The French were building sugar plantations and wanted meat, oxen and mules. The Spanish side had cattle and very few shops.

Around 1700, ranchers in inland towns such as Santiago, La Vega, Azua and Hincha drove cattle and mules west and swapped them for French brandy, cloth and clothing. Hides went out by sea too: in 1699 a royal official complained that about 14,000 had been shipped illegally to Dutch Curaçao, the island of Willemstad.

In 1720 a new tax on cattle sold to the French led the ranchers of Santiago into an armed stand-off with officials from the capital, an event remembered as the Tumultos de Santiago. The cattle trade was not formally allowed until a treaty of 1762.

Who were the corsairs of Santo Domingo?

Spain claimed the right to all trade with its colonies, so foreign ships trading on its coasts were smugglers in Spanish law. To catch them, Spain used corsairs, private ships licensed to seize enemies and smugglers. Ships doing this work were known as guardacostas, Spanish for coastguards.

A royal order of 30 March 1714 let governors in the Americas issue these licences themselves. In 1720 the governor of Santo Domingo licensed Benito Socorras, who that year seized smugglers at Saona, an island off the south-east coast, and in 1725 captured a Dutch ship. His crews earned no wages; they shared the value of what they seized, so they earned only from what they caught. One historian counts only six recorded clashes and seizures from 1720 to 1732, and more than eighty between 1739 and 1744, after war with Britain began.

What was slavery like in Spanish Santo Domingo?

Enslaved Africans were brought to Hispaniola very early. At Christmas 1521 about twenty Wolof-speaking enslaved people escaped from a sugar estate of Governor Diego Colón, Columbus’s son, as part of a planned rising. It is often called the earliest recorded slave revolt in the Americas. Many were caught and executed, and harsh new slave laws followed.

By the 1700s the colony was not a big plantation society like French Saint-Domingue. Enslaved people mostly worked on cattle ranches, in households, or in town, where owners hired them out to sell water, firewood and food. In the 1681 count about 2,200 of the colony’s people were enslaved, and free people of colour later outnumbered both enslaved and white people. Saint-Domingue was both the main buyer of Spanish cattle and the main source of the enslaved people sold in Santo Domingo.

Court records keep a few of their own stories. In 1707 Petronila Guerrero, a woman who had been freed, went to law when her former mistress kept her son as a slave, and a court ordered the boy returned to her. In 1727 at Bayaguana, the former owner of Antonia Días, a woman who had married a free man named Miguel Rincón, went to court to claim the couple’s goods, arguing that whatever an enslaved woman owned belonged to her owner. The records do not say how the case ended. People who escaped slavery in French Saint-Domingue also fled east; in 1677 the town of San Lorenzo de los Minas was founded near the city for them.