Puerta del Conde

Puerta del Conde
UNESCO World Heritage site
Location	Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
Part of	Colonial City of Santo Domingo
Criteria	Cultural: (ii), (iv), (vi)
Reference	526
Inscription	1990 (14th Session)
Coordinates	18°28′17″N69°53′30″W / 18.471500000015°N 69.891550000056°W Coordinates: 18°28′17″N69°53′30″W / 18.471500000015°N 69.891550000056°W
	Location of Puerta del Conde in the Dominican Republic

Last updated May 03, 2019

La Puerta del Conde (The Count's Gate) was the main entrance to the fortified city of Santo Domingo (in present-day Dominican Republic), named to honor Governor Captain-General Bernardino de Meneses Bracamonte y Zapata, 1st Count of Peñalva, who during his tenure saved the city from a siege in 1655 by Englishmen General Robert Venables and Admiral William Penn amid the Third Anglo-Spanish War.

The Dominican Republic is a country located in the island of Hispaniola, in the Greater Antilles archipelago of the Caribbean region. It occupies the eastern five-eighths of the island, which it shares with the nation of Haiti, making Hispaniola one of two Caribbean islands, along with Saint Martin, that are shared by two sovereign states. The Dominican Republic is the second-largest Caribbean nation by area at 48,671 square kilometers (18,792 sq mi), and third by population with approximately 10 million people, of which approximately three million live in the metropolitan area of Santo Domingo, the capital city.

Bernardino de Meneses Bracamonte, 1st Count de Peñalva was a Spanish nobleman and military leader during the Anglo-Spanish War (1654). He participated in the Siege of Santo Domingo (1655) and was victorious over the English forces.

The Siege of Santo Domingo was fought between April 23, 1655 and April 30, 1655, at the Spanish Colony of Santo Domingo. A force of 2,400 Spanish troops led by Governor Don Bernardino Meneses y Bracamonte, Count of Peñalba successfully resisted a force of 13,120 soldiers led by General Robert Venables and 34 ships under Admiral Sir William Penn of the English Commonwealth.

The gate is part of a structure called El Baluarte del Conde (The Count's Bulwark), a fort in Ciudad Colonial, the colonial area of Santo Domingo. The fort was part of a larger system of fortifications that ran along a defensive wall which surrounded Ciudad Colonial. The Altar of the Fatherland and Independence Park are located there.

Ciudad Colonial is the historic central neighborhood of Santo Domingo and the oldest permanent European settlement of the Americas. It has been declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. It is also known as Zona Colonial or more colloquially as "La Zona". The Ciudad Colonial is located on the west bank of the Ozama River, which bisects the city. It covers 1.06 km² (0.41 sq mi) bounded by a walled perimeter.

A defensive wall is a fortification usually used to protect a city, town or other settlement from potential aggressors. In ancient to modern times, they were used to enclose settlements. Generally, these are referred to as city walls or town walls, although there were also walls, such as the Great Wall of China, Walls of Benin, Hadrian's Wall, Anastasian Wall, the Cyclopean Wall Rajgir and the metaphorical Atlantic Wall, which extended far beyond the borders of a city and were used to enclose regions or mark territorial boundaries. In mountainous terrain, defensive walls such as letzis were used in combination with castles to seal valleys from potential attack. Beyond their defensive utility, many walls also had important symbolic functions – representing the status and independence of the communities they embraced.

El Altar de la Patria, or The Altar of the Homeland, is a white marble mausoleum in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic that houses the remains of the founding fathers of the Dominican Republic: Juan Pablo Duarte, Francisco del Rosario Sánchez, and Ramón Matías Mella, collectively known as Los Trinitarios. Within the mausoleum there are statues of the founding fathers, carved by Italian sculptor Nicholas Arrighini; there is as well an "eternal flame" that is kept lit in memory of the patriots. The Altar is within the Baluatre del Conde and is the main attraction of the Parque Independencia.

Francisco del Rosario Sánchez, one of the Dominican Founding Fathers, proclaimed Dominican independence and raised the first Dominican Flag, on February 27, 1844.^[1]

Francisco del Rosario Sánchez was a politician, national hero and founding father of the Dominican Republic. He is considered by Dominicans as the second leader of the 1844 Dominican War of Independence, after Juan Pablo Duarte and before Matías Ramón Mella. The Order of Merit of Duarte, Sanchez and Mella is named in honor of these men. He was the son of Olaya del Rosario Belén (1791–1849), a white woman of Canarian descent, and Narciso Sánchez Ramona (1789–1869), a pardo (triracial) man; his surnames are inverted because his parents were not married at the time of his birth, marrying in 1819.

Dominican War of Independence 1843-1849 war between the Dominican Republic and Haiti

The Dominican Independence War gave the Dominican Republic autonomy from Haiti on February 27, 1844. Before the war, the island of Hispaniola had been united under the Haitian government for a period of 22 years when the newly independent nation, previously known as the Captaincy General of Santo Domingo, was unified with Haiti in 1822. The criollo class within the country overthrew the Spanish crown in 1821 before unifying with Haiti a year later.

The flag of the Dominican Republic represents the Dominican Republic and, together with the coat of arms and the national anthem, has the status of national symbol. The blue on the flag stands for liberty, the white for salvation, and the red for the blood of heroes. The civil ensign follows the same design, but without the charge in the center. The flag was designed by Juan Pablo Duarte.

History

Colonial era

The construction of this site began in 1543 and the site was originally named Fort San Genaro.^[1] It was designed to defend Santo Domingo from invading armies and attacks by pirates and corsairs.^[2]

The murralla (defensive wall) was modified in 1655 after the English, led by William Penn and Robert Venables, undertook the Siege of Santo Domingo. The invasion was thwarted by Spanish troops commanded by the Captain General of the Colony, Don Bernardino de Meneses y Bracamonte, Count of Peñalva. Due to his valor, the site was named in his honor La Puerta del Conde. The muralla was appended to Fort San Genaro and the structures became indistinguishable and known since 1655 as La Puerta del Conde.^[2]

William Penn was the son of Sir William Penn, and was an English nobleman, writer, early Quaker, and founder of the English North American colony the Province of Pennsylvania. He was an early advocate of democracy and religious freedom, notable for his good relations and successful treaties with the Lenape Native Americans. Under his direction, the city of Philadelphia was planned and developed.

Robert Venables, was a soldier during the English Civil War and noted angler.

El Baluarte del Conde was a typical model of the school of 17th-century bastion fortresses of Italian influence, which are preserved in the Caribbean as a major legacy of 17th-century fortifications.^[2] The city's defensive wall reached its full footprint by about the 18th century with the addition of various defensive structures, effectively enclosing Colonial Santo Domingo in a pentagonal wall. La Puerta del Conde was the western entrance into Colonial Santo Domingo. Not much remains of the defensive walls which once surrounded the entire city, except for several sections with gates and forts, including: La Puerta del Conde, La Puerta de la Misericordia, Fuerte San Jose, Fuerte Santa Barbara, Fuerte San Gil, etc.

Contemporary Dominican Republic

Today, La Puerta del Conde serves as the main entrance to El Parque Nacional (The National Park), also referred to as Independence Park. Inscribed above the arch of La Puerta del Conde is "ỉDulce et Decori est pro patria moriḯ", in Latin, which means "It is indeed sweet and honorable to die for the fatherland".^[3] El Baluarte del Conde is a symbol of independence and contains several monuments and structures which attest to the Dominican struggle for freedom. It is common to refer to the fort as La Puerta del Conde/Parque Nacional, being that these are the two most visible and relevant symbols of the Dominican Republic; the park is where the Altar de la Patria (the Altar of the Fatherland) is located.

Parque Independencia

El Parque Independencia (Independence Park) is a historic park within the confines of El Baluarte del Conde so named because it contains the site where Dominican independence was proclaimed in 1844.^[2] The Altar de la Patria (see below) is located in the Park. Parque Independencia is nowadays only bound by a section of the original defensive wall, La Puerta del Conde. In 1912, the Park was redesigned by architect Antonin Nechodoma to its present state; no longer was there a street passing through the park.^[2] This redesign later facilitated the construction of the Altar de la Patria.

Altar de la Patria

The Altar de la Patria, or Altar of the Fatherland, is a mausoleum made of white marble, built in 1976. The Altar houses the remains of the founding fathers of the Dominican Republic: Juan Pablo Duarte, Francisco del Rosario Sánchez, and Matías Ramón Mella, collectively known as Los Trinitarios.^[1] Within the mausoleum there are statues of the founding fathers, carved by Italian sculptor Nicholas Arrighini, and there is also an "eternal flame" that is kept lit in memory of the patriots.

Related Research Articles

Santo Domingo, officially Santo Domingo de Guzmán, is the capital and largest city in the Dominican Republic and the largest metropolitan area in the Caribbean by population. In 2010, its population was counted as 965,040, rising to 2,908,607 when its surrounding metropolitan area was included. The city is coterminous with the boundaries of the Distrito Nacional, itself bordered on three sides by Santo Domingo Province.

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Juan Pablo Duarte was a Dominican writer, activist, poet, militar and liberal politician who was one of the "founding fathers" of the Dominican Republic. As one of the most celebrated figures in Dominican history, Duarte is considered a folk hero and revolutionary visionary in the modern Dominican Republic, who along with Francisco del Rosario Sánchez and Matías Ramón Mella, organized and promoted the movement, a secret society known as La Trinitaria, that eventually led to the Dominican revolt and independence from Haitian rule in 1844 and the start of a decennial Dominican War of Independence.

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Miguel D. Mena. Poet, essayist and publisher. He studied sociology in the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo where he graduated in 1986 with the thesis Ciudad, espacio y poder en Republica Dominicanca. He continued his research on the city of Santo Domingo in Germany where he has been living since 1990. His Phd from the Free University of Berlin has been recently published under the title: Iglesia, Espacio y Poder: Santo Domingo (1498–1521) Experiencia Fundacional del Nuevo Mundo. He has also written a collections of essays about the urban cuestion in the Dominican Republic and hundred of articles for newspapers and magazines about contemporary aspects of the Dominican capital. He has also written extensively about Dominican literature and especially about Vanguardism in the Dominican literature. He has been one of the leading figures in independent publishing since the mid eighties in Dominican Republic. He is now at the head of “Cielonaranja Ediciones”

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The Walls del Arrabal were the third in a set of five walls built around Madrid, now the capital of Spain. There are no remaining ruins of the Walls del Arrabal, leaving some debate as to their extent and the period of their construction. It is possible that the walls were built as early as the 12th century, however they were most likely constructed in 1438. The walls may have been intended to protect people against the plagues that ravaged the city at the time. The walls united the urbanized suburbs of the city and prevented entry of the infected.

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References

1 2 3 "Puerta del Conde-Parque Independencia". el-bohio.com. 2010. Retrieved 2010-07-28.
1 2 3 4 5 "El Baluarte del Conde". DiarioLibre.com. 2010. Archived from the original on 2014-02-02. Retrieved 2010-07-28.
↑ "Colonial Zone Walls and Gates". Colonialzone-DR.com. 2010. Retrieved 2010-08-03.

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[El_Bohio_Dominicano-1] 1 2 3 "Puerta del Conde-Parque Independencia". el-bohio.com. 2010. Retrieved 2010-07-28.

[Diario_Libre-2] 1 2 3 4 5 "El Baluarte del Conde". DiarioLibre.com. 2010. Archived from the original on 2014-02-02. Retrieved 2010-07-28.

[Colonial_Zone-Dominican_Republic-3] "Colonial Zone Walls and Gates". Colonialzone-DR.com. 2010. Retrieved 2010-08-03.