Four days in Santo Domingo: the oldest streets in the Americas, with the traffic still on them

Land, get into the old town, and start on the square. Columbus Park is where the neighbourhood sits in the evening: shoeshine chairs, domino tables, a bronze Columbus in the middle, and enough people watching to fill an hour.

The cathedral on the south side is the reason the square exists. Construction began in 1514 and finished in 1540, making it the first cathedral built in the Americas, and the interior is heavier and plainer than the front suggests, with a run of side chapels along both aisles. Shoulders covered, and it closes earlier than you think.

Then walk El Conde, the pedestrian street that runs west from the square, and eat somewhere on it or just off it.

The fortress first, because it opens early and the light is better on the river before noon. Fortaleza Ozama is the oldest formal military building still standing in the Americas, a squat stone keep above the river mouth with a courtyard and a walkable rampart. Take the guide at the gate; the building itself explains very little without one.

North along the river wall is the Alcázar de Colón, built from 1510 for Diego Colón, Columbus's eldest son, who governed the Indies from it. It has been rebuilt more than once and furnished with period pieces rather than its own, which does not stop it being the best room by room hour in the city.

Finish across the plaza at the Casas Reales, the old royal offices and court, whose collections cover sixteenth century Santo Domingo when it was the administrative capital of everything Spain held in the New World. The paved street outside is the oldest in the hemisphere, which is the sort of claim this city makes constantly and, for once, can back.

One day out of the sixteenth century. The Museo Memorial de la Resistencia Dominicana covers the twentieth, and particularly the thirty one years the country spent under Trujillo, whose name the city carried for most of them. It is unflinching, well laid out, and the single most useful thing you can do here for understanding the country you are standing in.

In the afternoon, cross to the Plaza de la Cultura, a 1970s civic square with the national museums around it. The Museo del Hombre Dominicano is the one to pick if you only do one: Taíno stonework and ceramics from before the Spanish arrived, and rooms on carnival and Afro-Dominican religion that most visitors never expect.

If the museums are shut, or if you have had enough of rooms, the botanical garden in the north of the city is genuinely large, properly kept, and has a Japanese garden and a river gorge inside it.

Cross the Ozama on the last morning. The Faro a Colón is a vast concrete cross laid flat on the ground, opened in 1992 for the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus's first crossing, with a tomb inside that the Dominican Republic insists holds his remains and Seville insists does not.

It is a strange, heavy, unloved building, and the museum inside it is a series of national displays donated by dozens of countries. Nobody comes away neutral about it, which is a better reason to go than most.

The airport is twenty minutes further east from there, so this costs you nothing except the earlier start.