First Cathedral of America

The Catedral Primada de América, also known as Catedral de Santo Domingo or Basílica Menor de Santa María, (official name: Basílica Catedral Metropolitana Santa María de la Encarnación Primada de América) is a cathedral dedicated to Santa María de la Encarnación, located in the Colonial City of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.
It is the oldest cathedral in America, consecrated by Pope Julius II in 1504. Seat of the Archdiocese of Santo Domingo, its construction began in 1512, under the direction of Bishop Fray García Padilla.
The architecture of the building is characterized by its solid walls and its three doors, two of them Gothic in contrast to the third and main Plateresque style.
The cathedral contains a vast artistic treasure consisting of altarpieces, paintings (including a panel of the Virgen de la Altagracia dated 1523), old cabinetry, furniture, monuments and tombstones, among other objects. The mausoleums of the archbishops of the colonial period stand out, it is also worth mentioning the tombstone of Simón Bolívar, one of the predecessors of the Liberator.

In the cathedral were housed for a time the remains of Christopher Columbus which moved to the Columbus Lighthouse. The valuable archbishop's throne, in Plateresque style, is dated 1540. It was part of the low choir, dismantled at the end of the last century to place the marble monument in which the remains of Christopher Columbus were kept.

The Cathedral is built with limestone, although some walls are made of masonry and bricks, and has twelve side chapels, three free naves and a main nave. The roof of the central nave is gabled. Those of the lateral naves are constituted by ribbed vaults that are accused to the outside, as if they were hemispherical domes. The longest length of the basilica is 54 m in the central nave to the bottom of the presbytery. The width of the three naves is 23 m. The highest height from floor to vault reaches 16 meters, and the built area exceeds 3,000 square meters. Fourteen side chapels were built throughout the cathedral's history.

The environment of the cathedral is formulated in three independent spaces, to the north the Plaza de Armas, the crenellated atrium is like an anteroom that marks the main entrance to the religious complex. To the south the cloister called Plazoleta de los Curas. The annexes around the courtyard allow a passage called Callejón de Curas.

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