Santo Domingo: Columbus Probably Slept Here

March 30, 2009 at 4:53 PM | by egw | Comments (0)

Jaunted editor Ellen Wernecke just got back from a trip to the Dominican Republic and, truly, has not finished unpacking yet. But that won't stop her from sharing the highlights of her trip, no siree.

The historical relativism and occasional indifference included in any given tour of old Santo Domingo would make a history professor's head explode. Our hired Dominican guide, absent the ability to ad-lib in English, repeated his frequently outlandish statements about, say, the former church where pregnant women would go and then magically have their babies in two hours.

He was a fount of these stories, doubtless rooted in truth, as well as the locations of every cigar store that offered him a premium for bringing by American shoppers.

What's true about Santo Domingo is that it's one of the oldest cities in the Western Hemisphere. Christopher Columbus never slept in the above house, but General Rafael Trujillo, who gave the city his own name for some 30 years, definitely did. (Our guide's spiel on Trujillo was about half as long as his explanation for a street called Calle de las Damas, or Street of Ladies.) Even more than his father, Diego Columbus left his stamp all over the oldest part of the city, including being the first person to decide where the supposed discoverer of the New World should be buried. Does he now call Santo Domingo his eternal home? Well... kinda.

Columbus' son buried his father in Seville in 1506, after which the remains were moved to Santo Domingo (then Hispaniola) in 1542. After that it gets murky: Either the remains were moved to Havana ahead of the French invasion of the island, and then back to Seville, or the patriots took the wrong box to Cuba with them and the original remains stayed behind. If you go to Seville, your guide there will swear up and down the real remains are there, after which he will glare at you without offering another topic of discussion.

Consensus holds that the Dominican Republic probably has the real remains, but in any case, what they have was repotted for a 500th anniversary national monument. We didn't make it over there ourselves, preferring the sepulchral colonial cathedral to the bright and shining half-truth.

By the way, we may have mocked our guide a little, but he did serve an important purpose: to scatter the touts with dollar signs in their eyes who would trail our group everywhere otherwise. When he left us, we were chased down the street by independent guides whose methods were, to say the least, creepy. Respecting their need to make a living (more of which, later), we still found ignoring them or (our usual trick) pretending we only spoke Russian a chore.

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