Santo Domingo builds up history's treasures.

• Author: Holston, Mark
• Position: Includes related article CARIMOS: preservation at work

AS EUGENIO PEREZ MONTAS STEPS from the cool interior of Santo Domingo's Casas Reales onto the city's oldest street, the sun-bleached Calle de las Damas, his gaze takes in an impressive inventory of hemispheric firsts. From the heart of the first Spanish capital in the New World, he looks south to the Fortaleza Ozama, the oldest European fortress in the Americas. Not far away stands the Catedral Basilica Menor de Santa Maria, the Hemisphere's first cathedral. Across the slow-moving Ozama River, the Capilla de la Virgen del Rosario claims first-church honors.

Defiled through the centuries by pirates, earthquakes, hurricanes, neglect and misguided modernizations, Santo Domingo's Ciudad Colonial (Colonial Zone) is nearing the end of a methodical renovation that began in the mid-1960s. Rushing to complete the project in time to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Dominican Republic, preservationists are working not only to forestall the crumbling of colonial facades, but also to instill a new appreciation for history.

For a quarter of a century, Perez Montas has led the Dominican effort to save the country's important colonial heritage. An architect and urban planner, he was an influential founding member of the Internatioal Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), a former president of the Dominican National Committee of the International Council of Museums (ICOM), and a professor of architectural history at Pedro Henriquez Urena National University.

Much of the restoration along the Calle de las Damas occurred between 1966 and 1978. One major project was the Casas Reales, which Perez Montas considers to be the zone's most historically significant structure--or, to be precise, structures: The Casas Reales was originally two palaces, one which served as a residence for the Governors and Captains General and the other as the seat of the Royal Audiencia, the colonial institution that governed the West Indies. Toward the end of the colonial period, the palaces housed the Royal Accountant, the mint, and administrative offices.

The Casas Reales continued to serve a governmental function through the mid-1969s. During the administration of Rafael Trujillo, the government's executive offices and the Ministry of Foreign Relations shared the space. As their predecessors had done, the officials of that era took the liberty of remodeling and re-designing the structures to suit their own tastes. Eventually, the...