Travel to Antigua Guatemala

The city we know as Antigua was founded on March 10, 1543, as Santiago de los Caballeros—the third iteration of Guatemala’s colonial capital. The Panchoy Valley was chosen for its fertile soil and relative stability; from this foundation the city grew into the administrative, religious, and educational center for the Captaincy-General of Guatemala, a jurisdiction encompassing present-day Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and the southern Mexican state of Chiapas.

For 230 years, Santiago de los Caballeros was one of the most important cities in the Spanish colonial empire, with a university (San Carlos, founded 1681), dozens of religious institutions, and monumental architecture rivaling Mexico City. Its fall came on September 29, 1773, when the Santa Marta earthquakes—a series of tremors over several days—leveled much of the city and killed an estimated 600 people. Spanish authorities relocated the capital to the Valley of the Hermitage (modern Guatemala City) in 1776. The partial abandonment of the old capital, combined with regulations prohibiting new construction, inadvertently preserved the ruins of baroque churches, convents, and civic buildings in a state found nowhere else in the Americas.