La Isabela
La Isabela is an important archaeological site near Puerto Plata in the Dominican Republic. Named after the Spanish Queen Isabella who funded Columbus’ expeditions to the New World, La Isabela was the first real European settlement in the Americas.
Aerial View of La Isabela in the Dominican Republic, Photo: Florida Museum of Natural History
La Isabela was established by Christopher Columbus on the northern coast of the Hispanola island in 1494 but was completely abandoned in 1498. Columbus and 1500 colonists arrived at the La Isabela site with 17 ships loaded with livestock, and building materials. A stone wall was built around the site to protest thatched huts in which the settlers lived but two major hurricanes, crop failures, famine and disease drove them all away.
Built after his second voyage to the New World, La Isabela was not the Columbus’ first construction on Hispaniola. On his first voyage – in 1942, Columbus built the fort of La Navidad (meaning Christmas, because it was founded on Christmas Day) at Concepción de la Vega – today’s Haiti. However, when Columbus returned from Spain two years later during his second voyage, instead of finding a bustling village, he found La Navidad destroyed and all of the settlers murdered. As he had learned from some of the Taino people whom he had met nearby, the settlers had been killed as a response to their mistreatment of the natives.
Columbus realized that he had underestimated the Tainos whom he originally deemed incapable of an offensive (after his first encounter with them, he wrote in his diary that the Tainos were naked, didn’t have any arms and were cowardly). He abandoned La Navidad and decided to build a new settlement further east (present day Dominican Republic), built a sturdy wall around it and named it La Isabella. This settlement was not meant to be either.
Site of Former Church in La Isabela (Iglesia means Church in Spanish), Photo: Tom Giebel, Flickr
The first major hit came with one of the first Atlantic hurricane observed by the Europeans in the Caribbean. La Isabella was mere one year old and after another major hurricane swept by its site a year later, settlers started to get restless and attempted to mutiny upon some of the ships to escape the island and return back to Spain. Repeatedly hit with hunger and disease, La Isabella was eventually abandoned and a new settlement was built on the southern side of Hispaniola, at the site of present day Santo Domingo.
The site where La Isabella once stood can still be visited today, but only stone basis of the surrounding wall and some of the more important structures (such as the church) can be seen. The rest was reclaimed by nature.
Video below is a document about La Isabella. It contains images of the site and many relics from history, but the commentary is all in Spanish:
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