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 Santo
Domingo, population 2,061,200 (2003), is the capital of the Dominican Republic.
The city is located at 18°30'N 69°59'W, on the Caribbean Sea, at the mouth
of the Ozama River. It is the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement
in the Americas, and was the first seat of Spanish colonial rule in the New World.
The city was founded between the years 1496 and 1498, as
Santo Domingo de Guzmán, by Bartolomeo Columbus (Bartolomé
Colón), brother of Christopher Columbus, on the eastern
bank of the Ozama River, and extended to the western bank
in 1502 by the governor Fray Nicolás de Ovando. The
city served as a model for other colonial cities of the New
World. In 1508, Ferdinand II of Aragon gave the city the coat
of arms with the emblem of "First City of the Indies."
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Inside the colonial city, the first citadel (Fortaleza Ozama),
the first hospital (hospital de San Nicolás de Bari),
the first cathedral (catedral de Santo Domingo), and the first
monastery (Monasterio de San Francisco) in the Western Hemisphere
were built.
 In
1538, construction began on the oldest university in the New World. It was named
Santo Tomás de Aquino, in honor of Saint Thomas Aquinas, and still survives
as the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo (UASD).
A tomb in the cathedral was reputed to be the final resting
place of Christopher Columbus, but the remains (the authenticity
of which is disputed, with Spain also claiming to have a set
of Columbus's bones) were moved to the Faro A Colón
(Columbus Lighthouse) in 1990.
The city was sacked by the English buccaneer Francis Drake
in 1586, and was almost completely destroyed by a hurricane
in 1930. It was rebuilt and renamed Ciudad Trujillo, after
dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, but the original
name was restored almost immediately after his assassination
in 1961.
The name Santo Domingo was originally Santo Domingo de Guzmán.
Under the First Constitution that name legally fell under
disuse in 1878, and was not restored again until 1966
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