The first monastery in the Americas
Begun around 1508, the Franciscan monastery of San Francisco was the first religious house of its kind built in the New World. Over the following decades it grew into a great complex of church, convent and chapels crowning a rise in the colonial city.
It was a centre of learning and faith in the first century of Spanish America.
Wrecked, and reborn in music
Its history is one of disaster: earthquakes, the 1586 sack of the city by Francis Drake, and repeated hurricanes left it in ruins, and in the 19th century its shell was pressed into use as an asylum. The monastery was never rebuilt.
Today the floodlit ruins are one of the Zone's most beloved gathering places — on Sunday evenings the local group Bonyé fills them with live son and merengue, and the old walls come back to life.
What you'll see
- ✦The soaring ruined arches and walls of the monastery
- ✦Sunday-evening open-air son and merengue among the ruins
- ✦The site of the first monastery in the Americas
- ✦Views over the Colonial Zone from the rise
