01 A street with a job
When Nicolás de Ovando laid out the new city in 1502, this was the first street to be paved. Not for luxury: it is the street running along the Ozama escarpment, linking the military fortress with the rest of the settlement.
That is why its original name was Calle de la Fortaleza. It was infrastructure, not promenade: the axis along which the garrison, the cargo coming up from the port and the officials administering the colony all moved.
02 Who María de Toledo was
María de Toledo (1490-1549) arrived on the island as the wife of Diego Colón, son of the navigator and governor of the colony. She belonged to the high Castilian nobility and was a great-niece of King Ferdinand of Aragon, so she did not come alone.
She was accompanied by a court of ladies, an entire retinue transferred at a stroke from the peninsular court to a city only just laid out on the far side of the ocean. They lived in the Alcázar, at the northern end of this same street.
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03 The name the people gave
Those women took to walking this street daily, at dusk, when the heat eases and the breeze comes up from the river. It was, quite simply, the best place in the city to walk: paved, wide and with a view of the water.
The rest of the inhabitants began referring to it by what they saw: the street of the ladies. The popular name displaced the official one and stayed for good. Five centuries later, the tile plaque still reads Calle Las Damas.
04 The clock read through a window
On this same street there is a second piece worth stopping for. In 1753, under the government of Francisco Rubio y Peñaranda, a stone sundial was raised in front of the Casas Reales building, the colony’s administrative seat.
The placement was no accident: it is set so that officials could check the time by leaning out of a window, without going down to the street. It has two marked faces, one facing south for the morning hours and another facing west for the afternoon.
The San Zenón cyclone, in 1930, carried off the bronze piece that cast the shadow. The clock marked nothing for more than sixty years, until a watchmaker, Ernesto Levy, made the missing part and returned it to working order.
05 How to walk it
It is a few hundred metres and takes twenty unhurried minutes. Start at the south, at Fortaleza Ozama, and head north: on either side follow the house occupied by Nicolás de Ovando, the Casas Reales with its clock and several sixteenth-century residences.
Do it at the same hour they did, at the end of the afternoon. The street faces east, so at that hour it catches raking light over the rooftops and the coral limestone turns golden. It is by far the best moment of the day here.
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