Santo Domingo, the first city the Spaniards built in the Americas (moved and rebuilt in stone from 1502)

A hurricane flattened the settlement in September 1502; the governor moved it across the Ozama and it was rebuilt in cut stone with wide, ordered streets. The crown's own chronicler, who lived there, says no town in Spain of its size was better built save Barcelona — and, two paragraphs after calling that governor a father to the Indians, records forty caciques burned in a hut and Anacaona hanged.