Antigua was the Spanish capital of all Central America from 1543 until the Santa Marta earthquake destroyed it in 1773. Three days tracing Baroque monasteries, colonial universities and the buried city the Crown ordered abandoned.
Built 1736 for Capuchin nuns who took vows of enclosure for life. The circular Torre del Retiro holds 18 cells around a courtyard with a unique water-filtration basement. Open 9:00-17:00 daily; Guatemala's best-preserved convent.
Founded 1579; holds the tomb of Hermano Pedro de San José de Betancur, canonised 2002 as Central America's first saint. The roofless nave collapsed in 1773 and pilgrims still leave plaques at the crypt.
The 1681 university building, third-oldest in the Americas, with Moorish-arched cloisters. Now displays 17th-18th century Guatemalan religious painting and sculpture from the destroyed convents of the old capital.
Finished 1717 and wrecked by earthquakes within months, then finished off in 1773. Enormous fallen vault blocks lie exactly where they landed — the most dramatic collapse field in the city, largely uncleared for 250 years.
Houses a replica of the first printing press brought to Central America in 1660 by José de Pineda Ibarra, plus incunabula and colonial imprints, inside the 1743 town hall arcade on the north side of the plaza.
Poor Clares from Puebla founded it in 1699; rebuilt after 1717, destroyed in 1773 and the nuns marched to the new capital. The intact cloister arcade and cistern show how enclosed communities lived on rainwater alone.
Once the richest monastery in the Americas. Excavations since 1989 uncovered crypts with intact 17th-century murals, a colonial silver hoard and a pre-Columbian collection, now six museums under one roof.
The 1654 hospital church founded by Bishop Juan de Zapata y Sandoval, still a working hospital after 370 years — one of the few colonial institutions in Antigua that never stopped operating through every earthquake.
The second Spanish capital, wiped out in 1541 when a lahar off Volcán de Agua killed Doña Beatriz de la Cueva, the Americas' only female governor, days into her rule. The 16th-century parish church survives.
The stone cross above the city, placed in 1930, gives the clearest read of the 1543 grid that Juan Bautista Antonelli laid out — you can trace every ruined convent block and the north-south alignment on Volcán de Agua.
The 1547 palace-church of Francisco Marroquín, first bishop of Guatemala, on the slopes above Antigua. His residence, chapel and the orchard he planted survive largely as built — the oldest standing episcopal seat in Central America.
A village absorbed by Antigua where colonial-era stonecutting continued into the modern jade trade; the neo-Gothic 1670s-founded church anchors a quarter that supplied masons for rebuilding after each quake.