Santa María de la Antigua del Darién: the Aftermath of Colonial Settlement

Abstract

Chance played a great role in the entire first part of the Iberian conquest of the continent nowadays known as America. Among the many plays of destiny, the first and crucial one was that Columbus by chance (and by mistake of calculations) found the Antilles, while he was sailing towards Cathay and Cipango. The encounter with what was perceived more and more clearly as a new land of considerable dimensions confronted the Spanish rulers with a totally new situation, which they began to face with strategies that were sometimes contradictory, but always following from the political and military experience they had gained in the phase of European expansion and consolidation. In Late Medieval Europe, the concept of empire was linked to an idealized line of succession dating back to the Holy Roman Empire. However, it was precisely the fall of the Byzantine or Eastern Roman Empire, with the conquest of Constantinople by Mehmed ii in 1453, that elicited the need to open new roads from the West to the Indies. The kings of Spain were inspired by the Roman imperial model when they had to face the abyss of the unknown. The governors and governances of the New World colonies were the equivalents of the Roman governors in the imperial provinces. Likewise, the main base of territorial domination was the founding of cities, which acted as military as well as symbolic bastions of the nascent Spanish imperial expansion. The cities of the new colonies were built with inspiration in the ideal model of the orthogonal Greek-Roman city, in a new Renaissance version that placed the cathedral church and the Plaza Mayor at the center of the urban grid. However, the models of Spanish imperial domination and the ideal plans of the cities to be founded in the New World, so clearly conceived in theory, were reshaped and transformed when confronted with the reality of the new lands, that is, with the indigenous peoples who inhabited it and with the environment so different from that of Europe. Santa María de la Antigua del Darién is a paradigmatic case since it is the first Castilian city founded on the American continent. We do not know the