Mexican Urbanism in the Sixteenth Century

Abstract

To found innumerable towns was the exceptional privilege and duty of the early colonists in Mexico.1 Beginning with the first Spanish advance into that country, all authorities were engaged in a steady, unsystematic, and prolific campaign of urban creation. The paths of the conquistadores, of the missionaries, the bishops and priests and civilian settlers, were lined with hundreds of settlements founded before 1580.2 Such towns varied in size from a few families to the city of sixty thousand inhabitants.3 Some of them were intended to fulfil strategic needs, others were trade route settlements, and still others satisfied the need for segregating Indians from the white settlers.

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