Dominican Republic - Archaeological Site of Villa La Isabela

Villa La Isabela Archaeological Site includes, among other archaeological vestiges, the ruins of the buildings built in the first European settlement in America: the Villa of La Isabela. The site has 2 hectares and is located on a calcareous cliff over the Atlantic Ocean, at the foot of the northern mountains rage, northwest of the Dominican Republic (north of the island La Hispaniola) and between the cities of Puerto Plata and Montecristi, on the east coast of La Isabela Bay. In 1493 the Admiral Christopher Columbus selected this place surrounded by natural borders to establish the first European “villa” in America to conquer and colonize these lands, reasons to his second trip to the “New World”. The archaeological site has the foundations of five major vestiges: a Tower (watchtower), a Royal Warehouse, a "Tesorería", a Church and the Admiral Christopher Columbus’s house (his only dwelling on the continent), all of them the first made by European in America. In general terms, the urban morphology is dispersed, with no specific pattern of distribution, with the exception of for the geographical conformation dictated by building, distinctive of a medieval town. In the north, certain functional cohesion between the warehouse and the "Tesorería" suggest the existence of a civic-military-administrative axis in the south, the church and the Columbus´s house point defines a political-religious axis. The Site also includes the place where the first shipyard and city´s pier were located. Nowadays those elements are buried under debris. Situated on a short distance from the fortified area there is a quarry used to take the stones used to build the buildings of the villa.