Modern And Colonial Guatemala | Porta Hotels

Modern And Colonial

Guatemala City: the beginning of everything.

From the very arrival to the City of Guatemala, the tourist can observe that the Guatemalan society is a vibrant world where the past is intermixed with the present, the mysticism and the modernity of the technology and the craft. Each corner, street and building is a living testimony of the force of the legacy of thousands of generations that have made of Guatemala a complex and interesting cultural and social amalgam.

Nueva Guatemala de La Asunción, the name of the current capital of the country, is a strong metropolis with modern buildings, art galleries, night clubs, first class hotels and all type of amusements and comforts. It is the center of cultural activities and headquarters of the most important social institutions in Central America. Likewise, it is considered as the most modern city in the isthmus. Its strong commercial and social activity take place among the downtown, the oldest part of the city—or“El Centro”, as it is called—with its Plaza Mayor (Central Square), the Metropolitan Cathedral and the National Palace of Culture as the most renown edifications, as well as the Congress and many other government buildings as the center of the economic and social power of the country. This area conjugates the neoclassical architecture of palaces and houses that, little by little, give step to the most modern part in the city, toward the Southwest side, whose commercial and hotel buildings can be observed from the height of the interesting Miguel Ángel Asturias National Theater, which dominates the valley and it’s located in the heart of the Civic Center, both the law and economic Guatemala’s axis. The Zona Viva—as it is known the vibrant Zone 10—is the most famous conglomerate of trade and national and international offices; it offers to the visitor all type of amusement and a wide range of sensations. Restaurants of all kinds, modern lounges and bars, galleries, and commercial centers keep special attractiveness for the visitors if they decide to stay in the city whether for reasons of business or pleasure.

The ancestral legacy

Just a few meters of La Aurora International Airport, it is possible to appreciate the first vestiges of the colonial architecture, hidden now between trees and flower gardens: a XVII Century Spanish aqueduct that supplied water to the city in early times, built over a watering channel that the old Mesoamerican inhabitants used to make the water flow to Kaminaljuyú, the Mayan city that rose in the middle of what now is part of the urban part of the city known as the 7 and 11 Zones. Following the hint of these Spanish and Mayan vestiges—an example of the mixture of identities in the country—you can travel among hills of magnificent greenery and pleasant climate in the department of Sacatepéquez. The road will take you from the capital from Guatemala to a small charming valley between volcanoes and groves, called Panchoy ("valley of the lake" in Mayan Cachiquel language), where La Antigua Guatemala is located, dormant between roses and bougainvilleas, watched silently by three colossal volcanoes, guardians of the locked secrets inside the beautiful ruins of the ancient capital of the Kingdom of Guatemala.

Place of churches, white domes and remain silent paved, “The Very Noble and Very Loyal City of Santiago de Los Caballeros de Guatemala” is the main colonial tourist attraction of the country. Its many churches and convents, diversity of hotels and services, restaurants and charming inns, make of this romantic colonial city the favorite destination of political and art famous people, and all kinds of international travelers, many of which, seduced by the scent of the flowers and the terracotta-colored walls, decide to stay here for good, like the Spanish conquerors that transformed this city in the XVIII Century into the most beautiful jewel of the Spanish Crown, suddenly destroyed that same century, in 1773, by a series of devastating earthquakes that left it uninhabited and in ruins. With many efforts, La Antigua Guatemala has recovered, as times goes by, its romantic colonial city airs and has aroused among the ruins, and in 1979, the UNESCO declared it Cultural Patrimony of the Humanity.