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https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2021.43.2.63

The Faro a Colón in Santo Domingo:Reinterpreting a “More Nearly Perfect” Memorial to Christopher Columbus

Mairi Cowan and Christoph Richter

The Regents of the University of California and the National Council on Public History

Citation (Chicago Manual of Style 17th ed.):Cowan, Mairi and Christoph Richter. “The Faro a Colón in Santo Domingo: Reinterpreting a “More Nearly Perfect” Memorial to Christopher Columbus.” The Public Historian 43, no. 2 (May 2021): 63-80.

2021

The Faro a Colon in Santo Domingo

Reinterpreting a “More Nearly Perfect” Memorial toChristopher Columbus

Mairi Cowan and Christoph Richter

ABSTRACT: The “Faro a Colon,” or “Columbus Lighthouse,” is perhaps the largestmemorial to Christopher Columbus in the world. Inaugurated in 1992 as a celebrationof the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s first arrival in the Americas, it is visiblethroughout much of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. This article argues that thetypical presentation of the monument is badly misaligned with the historical record,but that a historically and historiographically informed interpretation can lead toa truer understanding of the violence and greed of colonization. Contrary to what itsdesigners wanted to show about Columbus, and in some ways in spite of itself, theColumbus Lighthouse conveys with unusual clarity the problems of memorializingone of the most (in)famous figures in world history.

KEY WORDS: Christopher Columbus, memorial, Caribbean, Dominican Republic, colo-nization, historiography, teaching

The politics of public memory have become focused on historical monuments.Debate rages over what to do with memorials to Confederate soldiers in the UnitedStates, schools named after prime ministers in Canada, and statues of imperialexplorers in England. Simplistic accusations about attempts to “erase the past” testthe patience of historians who are trying to help people understand the complex-ities of history, and disputes heat up about whether monuments should beremoved, altered, or left exactly as they are. The forty-fifth president of the UnitedStates, Donald J. Trump, declared in September 2020 that he would establisha national commission to promote patriotic education and a National Garden ofAmerican Heroes. Meanwhile, in both the US and abroad, groups of citizens havestarted taking matters into their own hands to protest or remove monuments thatdo not represent the values of our own time. Statues of King Leopold II, the brutalcolonizing king of Belgium, Edward Colston, a slave trader in Bristol, and Chris-topher Columbus, the so-called “Discoverer of America,” are being torn down,defaced, and thrown into the sea.

THE PUBLIC HISTORIAN, Vol. 43, No. 2, pp. 63–80 (May 2021). ISSN: 0272-3433, electronic ISSN

1533-8576. © 2021 by The Regents of the University of California and the National Council on PublicHistory. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproducearticle content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page,https://www.ucpress.edu/journals/reprints-permissions. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2021.43.2.63.

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Now imagine a historical monument that is the size of several city blocks, visiblefor kilometers, and tied up in the painful knots of nineteenth-century pride,twentieth-century tyranny, and twenty-first century apathy. This is the Faroa Colon, the “Columbus Lighthouse” in Santo Domingo. Inaugurated in 1992 tocelebrate the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s landing in the Americas,the Faro looms in hulking silence on a hill overlooking the Caribbean’s biggestmetropolis and capital of the Dominican Republic. Today, it is neither celebratednor protested. Mostly, it is ignored.

The Faro’s history has brought it to a strange place among historical commem-orations. Not really a lighthouse by most standards, nor what most people wouldprobably think of as a monument, it calls out for an interpretation that is informedboth by the history of Columbus’s voyage and by the historiography of theColumbian legacy. The ideals behind the Faro’s original design and its currentpresentation by the Ministry of Tourism in the Dominican Republic are badlymisaligned with the historical record of colonization in the Americas. And yet, ina strange way, it is possible to understand this Columbus Lighthouse as conveyingwith unusual clarity the problems of memorializing one of the most famous andinfamous figures in world history. In contrast to what its designers, builders, andsupporters hoped for in their celebration of a heroic discoverer, the Faro a Colonshould be seen as one of the truest memorials to Christopher Columbus’s reallegacy of pain and devastation.

The Lighthouse Today

The Faro as a building is not so much imposing as oppressive. One measure is itsphysical dimensions. Sources report that the main building is either 700 feet longand seven stories high,1 800 feet long and 150 feet high,2 2,195 feet long and 104 feethigh,3 or half a mile long and ten stories high.4 Although precise measurements ofits size are elusive, simply put, it’s very big.

From up close, you cannot see the whole thing at once. If you walk around itsexterior, you will find that it is shaped like a cross lying on the ground. Carved intoits sides are the names of countries in the Americas, quotations from ancientauthors that purport to show either the value of exploration or the existence ofan unexplored hemisphere, and many more crosses.

Anyone wanting to go inside the Faro can pay 100 pesos (about $1.70) for a ticket.The air within is still and dusty. A long corridor facing the entrance is open to the

1 Manuel Jimenez, “They Threw a Party to Celebrate Columbus, But Nobody Came,” ChicagoTribune, October 9, 1992.

2 Colin Harding, “Rocky Course for Lighthouse in Eye of Storm,” Independent, October 7, 1992.3 Douglas Farah, “Curse of Columbus? President Misses Dominican Celebrations,” Washington

Post, October 7, 1992.4 Solomon J. Greene, “Staged Cities: Mega-Events, Slum Clearance, and Global Capital,” Yale

Human Rights and Development Law Journal 6 ( January, 2003): 161–88; “What Price Columbus?”Washington Post, September 28, 1992.

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Exterior view of the Faro a Colon, as seen from the north. (Photo by authors)

Interior corridor of the Faro a Colon facing east with doorways to small exhibit rooms.(Photo by authors)

The Faro a Colon in Santo Domingo 65

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sky, yet still feels confined. Along the sides are rooms set up like radiating chapelsand filled with items donated from various countries. Some contain objects linkedto early trans-Atlantic contact; others display a seemingly random selection ofhistorical artifacts with no connection to Columbus or the modern Caribbean.

At the place where the arms of the cross intersect—the architectural (if notgeometrical) centre of the building—Dominican soldiers guard an elaborate marbletomb. It is very ornate, very nineteenth-century neo-gothic, very exuberant ingilded Latin inscriptions praising the man whose mortal remains are supposedlycontained within: Christopher Columbus.

As is probably obvious by now, the Faro is not really a lighthouse in any conven-tional sense. Lying prone on the ground, it certainly does not look like a typicallighthouse, and at more than a kilometer from shore, its location is not particularlyuseful for guiding ships. It does emit light, or at least, it can. It is equipped with 149lights to project beams in the shape of a cross into the sky so powerfully that they canbe seen all the way to Puerto Rico, almost three hundred kilometers away.

Surrounding the building is a large landscaped area that might be called a park. Itis windblown and dry, with an unkempt look of abandonment. Grass withers in the

The tomb at the crossing of the Faro a Colon. (Photo by authors)


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Detail of the tomb. (Photo by authors)

Detail of the tomb. (Photo by authors)


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sun, and a few scraggly trees brow aridly in the wind. The parking lot is mostlyempty. Inside and out, the site of the Faro a Colon is practically deserted aside fromthe soldiers who guard it, a very few tourists, and, when wind conditions are right,some locals flying their kites.

Overall, the atmosphere is one of desolation and neglect even after considerableinvestment by the Dominican Republic’s government. A substantial refurbishmentwas undertaken in 2018 to clean up the buidling and grounds ahead of the SpecialOlympics World Tennis Invitational Tournament, held in a nearby park and spon-sored by the Dominican Republic’s First Lady.5 Diogenes Gonzalez, governorof the Faro a Colon, tried to alleviate concerns at the time about safety on thesite, saying a few days before the start of the event that “we have a completelysecure Columbus Lighthouse, all around it we have lighting and spotlights: Iinvite all the people to come at night to a monument that everyone shouldknow.”6 Go Dominican Republic, the official Dominican Republic Tourism

The tomb at the crossing of the Faro a Colon. (Photo by authors)

5 “MOPC asfalta y senaliza Calles del Faro a Colon,” Gobierno de la Republica DominicanaOrbas Publicas, https://www.mopc.gob.do/noticias/mopc-asfalta-y-se%C3%B1aliza-calles-del-faro-a-col%C3%B3n/.

6 “Tenemos un Faro a Colon completamente seguro, en todos los alrededores hay iluminacion yreflectores: invito a todo el pueblo a venir de noche a un monumento que deben de conocerlo todos.”Abraham Mendez, “Museo Faro a Colon listo para recibir visitants,” El Caribe, https://www.elcaribe.com.do/2018/11/09/museo-faro-colon-listo-para-recibir-visitantes/.


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website, offers a photograph of the Faro with bright pink flowers in the fore-ground, and tags of “home,” “family-friendly,” “iconic sites,” and “museums” tosuggest a wholesome, safe, educational visit.

Not everyone would use such tags. We have taken students to the site, andthey perceive it very differently from the official tourism description. Thestudents visit the site as part of a course we teach at the University of TorontoMississauga on the history and ecology of the Columbian Exchange. In thefield portion of the course, students join us on a nine-day trip to SantoDomingo and the Samana Peninsula to see historical sites firsthand and expe-rience how the effects of the Columbian Exchange have shaped today’s cul-tural and ecological realities in the Dominican Republic. While in SantoDomingo we visit several places of historic and cultural significance. In theearly stages of planning the course we were ambivalent about taking the groupto the Columbus Lighthouse, but we decided that it would be interesting forstudents to compare its presentation of Columbus’s legacy with what they hadbeen studying in our seminar. We are glad that we made that decision, becausethe students’ reactions to the Faro’s enormity—reactions ranging from cynicallaughter to on-the-spot sharp postcolonial critique—have convinced us thatthis monument can be a useful teaching tool when adequately contextualized.In contrast to what the Dominican Republic Tourism website would suggest,our students describe the Faro as “a monstrosity,” “ostentatiously in-appropriate,” “an architectural reminder of imperialism,” “colonialpropaganda,” “a historically slanted viewpoint,” and “iconically ironic.” Justacross the river is the colonial zone of Santo Domingo, a UNESCO world

One of the photos from the landing page for the Santo Domingo section of the officialwebsite of the Dominican Republic Tourism agency. (https://www.godominicanrepublic.com/santo-domingo/)


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heritage site and genuinely beautiful; the Faro, by contrast, is both an aestheticand a historic offence.7

Planning, Construction, Inauguration

The Faro was more than a century in the making. The first plans to build a largememorial to Columbus in the Dominican Republic started in the mid-1800s, andthese were given an injection of enthusiasm in 1877 with the exhumation of remainsthought to be those of Columbus from the cathedral in Santo Domingo.8 Anelaborate marble mausoleum was erected in the cathedral in time for the quater-centenary celebrations of Columbus in 1892, but the lighthouse would need to wait.

View of the Faro a Colon from the west with kite-flying in the foreground. (Photo byauthors)

7 On the architecture of colonial Santo Domingo, see Paul B. Niell and Richard A. Sundt,“Architecture of Colonizers/Architecture of Immigrants: Gothic in Latin America from the 16th tothe 20th Centuries,” Postmedieval 6, no. 3 (2015): 243–47; Paul B. Niell, “Late Gothic in the Sixteenth-Century Cathedral of Santa Maria la Menor, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic,” Postmedieval 6,no. 3 (2015): 258–71. On the investments made to encourage heritage and gentrification, see LaurenceBuzenot and Jesus Manuel Gonzalez Perez, “La ville coloniale de Santo-Domingo (Republiquedominicaine), entre patrimonialisation et gentrification,” Etudes caribeennes 39–40 (April-August,2018).

8 Dixa Ramırez, Colonial Phantoms: Belonging and Refusal in the Dominican Americas, from the19th Century to the Present (New York: New York University Press, 2018). For nineteenth-centuryarguments that the remains found in the cathedral were truly those of Christopher Columbus, seeJose Gabriel Garcıa, Compendio de la historia de Santo Domingo, Tomo 1 (Santo Domingo: Imprentade Garcıa Hermanos, 1878), and Emiliano Tejera, Los Dos restos de Cristobal Colon exhumados dea Catedral de Santo Domingo en 1795 i 1877 (Santo Domingo: Imprenta de Garcıa Hermanos, 1879).


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In the 1920s, the Pan American Union developed an interest in the project.This organization had its origins as the International Bureau of AmericanRepublics at the first Pan American Conference in 1889. With an initial goalof promoting economic ties across the hemisphere, it became a voluntarygroup of American Republics that was (according to its own publication)“devoted to the development and conservation of peace, friendship, andcommerce between them all.”9 To many in Latin America, the cooperationsuggested by the Pan American Union, headquartered in Washington, DC,was really a cover for efforts from the United States to dominate thehemisphere.10

The Resolution of the Fifth International Conference of American States opined in1923 that “a monument has not yet been erected in America to perpetuate thecollective sentiment of gratitude, admiration, and thanksgiving toward Christo-pher Columbus, discoverer of America and benefactor of humanity.”11 Inresponse, the Conference launched a competition for the monument’s designin 1928. Its lengthily entitled Program and Rules of the Competition for the Selectionof an Architect for The Monumental Lighthouse which the Nations of the World willErect in the Dominican Republic to the Memory of Christopher Columbus stated thatthe competition’s goal was “to find the perfect symbol which will worthily rep-resent the man and the deed to be commemorated.” The competitors were clearlyinstructed about the scope and significance of what they were attempting. Tomake their offering “more nearly perfect and more genuinely expressive of thesignificance of the discovery,” they were directed to “seek a universal viewpoint,”with a vision that “must include the five centuries of world history in which thediscovery of America is the most transcendental fact.”12 The monument would beerected across the Ozama river from the colonial quarter of Santo Domingo,linking the old city to the new construction.13 More than 450 designs for a memo-rial lighthouse were submitted. The winning entry was by Joseph Lea Gleave,a relatively unknown British architect who was only twenty-three years old.14

Gleave described his design as both ancient and modern, both organic and

9 John Barrett, The Pan American Union: Peace Friendship Commerce (Washington: Pan AmericanUnion, 1911), 7.

10 Lars Schoultz, Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy Toward Latin America(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 283–89; Jeffrey Sommers, “Haiti and the HemisphericImperative to Invest: The Bulletin of the Pan American Union,” Journal of Haitian Studies 9, no. 1(2003): 71.

11 Bulletin of the Pan-American Union, 63 (1929), 680.12 Albert Kelsey (F.A.I.A., Technical Advisor), Program and Rules of the Competition for the

Selection of an Architect forThe Monumental Lighthouse which the Nations of the World will Erect in theDominican Republic to the Memory of Christopher Columbus (Pan-American Union, 1928).

13 Francisco Egana Casariego, “El Concurso Internacional para el Faro de Colon: El Proyectoespanol premiado,” Goya: Revista de arte 331 (2010): 160.

14 “Joseph Lea Gleave,” DSA Architect Biography Report, http://www.scottisharchitects.org.uk/architect_full.php?id¼206874.


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mechanical: “an Aztec serpent or a human body lying prostrate,” that was also“reminiscent of aeroplanes, ships, motor cars.”15

Construction was delayed for many years, hindered by the three-decade dicta-torship of Rafael Trujillo starting in the 1930s, power struggles in the 1960s, and USinvasion and occupation in 1965.16 Work on the lighthouse finally began in 1986,with modifications to Gleave’s design by Dominican architect Teofilo Carbonell.17

By then, in an era of increasing urbanization and large-scale emigration, the gov-ernment of the Dominican Republic was seeing potential for the Faro to protectconservative ideas of national identity.18 The uncritical celebration of Columbus inthis country was at odds with reactions in much of Latin America and parts of theCaribbean, where people reasserted Indigenous rights, debated the appropriatenessof any commemoration to Columbus, and protested the quincentenary celebra-tions. In the Dominican Republic, the name of the official commission establishedfor the 1992 anniversary left no doubt about its celebratory intent or its connectionsto discovery and conversion: “Comision Dominicana para la Celebracion del Quin-to Centenario del Descubrimiento y Evangelizacion de America.”19 Dominicanleaders wanted the monument to project an image of a grand country with a longEuropean lineage, something that they hoped would increase international tourismand investment. Tourism was already an important part of the economy, bringingin almost twice as much income as the more traditional products of sugar, coffee,and cocoa combined. This economic shift did not enrich the country in any simplesense, however: building the infrastructure to support tourism’s growth—the roadsand bridges, the museums and parks, the hotels and sports complexes—cost thegovernment more money than tourism brought in, and this expenditure added tothe growing foreign debt.20

Plans for the Faro were pulled into the tourism vortex, and they contributedanother layer to the industry’s injustices. The chosen site for the Columbus Light-house was not emptily awaiting construction of the monument. It was a neighbor-hood, one of many whose inhabitants were evicted during the late 1980s and early1990s to provide what President Joaquın Balaguer hoped would be “a dignified

15 Ramırez, Colonial Phantoms, 120; Robert Alexander Gonzalez, Designing Pan-America: U.S.Architectural Visions for the Western Hemisphere (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 105.

16 Eric Paul Roorda, Lauren Derby, and Raymundo Gonzalez, eds., The Dominican RepublicReader: History, Culture, Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 6–7; B. W. Higman, AConcise History of the Caribbean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 204–6, 259–61.

17 Gonzalez, Designing Pan-America.18 Dixa Ramırez, Colonial Phantoms: Belonging and Refusal in the Dominican Americas, from the

19th Century to the Present (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 112–14.19 Fabienne Viala, The Post-Columbus Syndrome: Identities, Cultural Nationalism, and Commem-

orations in the Caribbean (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 1–9, 109–16, 131–36. On a morerecent debate about the replacement of a statue to Columbus with one of Juana Azurduy, a nine-teenth-century mestiza revolutionary, see Cheryl Jimenez Frei, “Columbus, Juana and the Politics ofthe Plaza: Battles over Monuments, Memory and Identity in Buenos Aires,” Journal of Latin AmericanStudies 51, no. 3 (2019): 607–38.

20 Greene, “Staged Cities,” 161–88.


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atmosphere for the observance of the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ discovery ofthe New World.”21 To make room for the Faro and surrounding park, over tenthousand people were forced out of their homes in Barrio Maquiteria. Then, a wallwas erected to block visitors to the Faro’s site from having to see the people still livingin poverty next to it. Locals dubbed it “the wall of shame.”22 On one side of the wallwas a residential area with unpaved streets, uncollected garbage, and a public primaryschool with no electricity or running water.23 On the other side was a monumentwhose cost was kept secret but was estimated at between $70 million and $250million in 1992. In a country with an annual per capita income of about $700, theFaro and its wall were a painful reminder of indifference to inequality.24

View from the Faro a Colon towards the city center. (Photo by authors)

21 Joseph B. Treaster, “At 80, the Master Builder is Busy (and Boastful),” The New York Times,April 7, 1988.

22 Kenneth Freed, “Dominicans, Sadly, Find It’s a New World,” Los Angeles Times, October 12,1992; Greene, “Staged Cities,” 161–88; Edmundo Morel and Manuel Mejia, “The DominicanRepublic: Urban Renewal and Evictions in Santo Domingo,” in Evictions and the Right to Housing:Experience from Canada, Chile, the Dominican Republic, South Africa, and South Korea, ed. AntonioAzuela, Emilio Duhau, and Enrique Ortiz (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre,1998), 83–143.

23 Michael J. Rosenfeld, “Goodbye Columbus: Dominicans and the ‘Wall of Shame,’” NationFebruary 24, 1992.

24 Howard W. French, “Pope’s Mass at Dominican Monument to Columbus,” New York Times,October 12, 1992.


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Preparations went ahead for the inauguration ceremony. The big event wassupposed to be hosted by President Balaguer, keen to impress foreign dignitarieswith what he saw as the essence of the Dominican Republic. He and other Domin-ican elites were committed to instilling a deeper appreciation for the people’sSpanish (therefore European and white) heritage while rejecting or only grudginglyacknowledging African contributions to Dominican culture. The DominicanRepublic shares an island with Haiti, but the two countries do not have an easyrelationship. In the Dominican regime’s anti-Haitianism, Blackness was negativelyassociated with the country on the west side of the island. Balaguer’s esteem forEurope, by contrast, was evident when he wrote of Hispaniola’s “outstanding roleas the catalyst that integrated the American Continent into European Civilizationand the Christian Faith.”25 His celebration of the Columbus Lighthouse was part ofa larger institutionalization of Hispanophilia and Negrophobia in Dominican iden-tity, seen also in a poster exhibition organized by the Dominican Commission forthe Celebration of the Fifth Centennial of the Discovery and Evangelization ofAmerica. This exhibition presented twenty-nine “firsts” from the initial half-centuryof Spanish colonial rule in the Americas, celebrating the development of Europeansettlements, conversions to Catholicism, extraction of national resources, and slaverebellions, while slyly avoiding any mention of Hispaniola being the first place in theAmericas to bring enslaved Africans to its shores.26 The Columbus Lighthouse fit intothe same tradition of extolling the Dominican people’s Spanishness, Catholicism, andwhiteness. As a symbol of Dominicanidad, it celebrated the country’s inheritanceselectively, steering citizens into a sense of patriotic belonging through an incompletestory of the country’s origins that focused on Christian Spain while ignoring Africancontributions and the violence of colonization.27

In the end, Balaguer could not be present at the inauguration event, because hewas attending the funeral of his sister. He was not the only one missing. On the listof invited guests were the King and Queen of Spain and numerous heads of state.Most canceled. The planned television extravaganza to be hosted by Bob Hope wasscrapped.28 Pope John Paul II was on the island for a General Conference of Latin

25 Quoted in Ginetta E. B. Candelario, Black Behind the Ears: Dominican Racial Identity fromMuseums to Beauty Shops (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 90.

26 Medar Serrata, “Anti-Haitian Rhetoric and the Monumentalizing of Violence in JoaquınBalaguer’s Guıa emocional de la ciudad romantica,” Hispanic Review 81, no. 3 (2013): 263–84; Cande-lario, Black Behind the Ears, 89–91. On Balaguer’s use of racialized political discourses, see DavidHoward, Coloring the Nation: Race and Ethnicity in the Dominican Republic (Boulder, CO: LynneRienner Publishers, 2001), 161–63. On Dominican ideas of Blackness, see Silvio Torres-Saillant,Introduction to Dominican Blackness (New York: CUNY Dominican Studies Institute, 2010) and AprilJ. Mayes, The Mulatto Republic: Class, Race, and Dominican National Identity (Gainesville: UniversityPress of Florida, 2014).

27 Christian Krohn-Hansen, “A Tomb for Columbus in Santo Domingo: Political Cosmology,Population and Racial Frontiers,” Social Anthropology 9, no. 2 (2001): 165–92; Viala, The Post-Columbus Syndrome, 111.

28 Jimenez, “They Threw a Party to Celebrate Columbus, But Nobody Came,” 2; Greene,“Staged Cities,”161–88.


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American Bishops, but he too stayed away from the Faro’s inauguration. (He didcome to the Faro a few days later to celebrate an open-air Mass. In his homily, hespoke of the evangelization of Columbus’s voyage and the coming of light fivehundred years ago in that place. But he also said that the five-hundredth anniver-sary of Columbus’s arrival was a propitious time humbly to ask forgiveness foroffences and to create conditions that would allow for a fair development for all,especially the abandoned and dispossessed.29)

The press was not complimentary in its coverage of the Columbus Lighthouse’sinauguration. Journalists from abroad wrote about the celebration as indicative ofPresident Balaguer’s pretentions and prejudices. They saw it as an attempt to showhis legitimacy when many Dominicans believed that he had rigged the most recentelection, and to celebrate his country’s colonial past while hanging on to a repres-sive administration.30 They described the Faro itself as an “anonymous, inertgrayness,”31 a “concrete monolith,”32 a “gloomy monument,”33 a “protuberanceof concrete.”34 The inauguration of the Columbus Lighthouse, far from showingthe world the greatness of Columbus’s connection to the Dominican Republic,turned out to be an international embarrassment.

Rediscovering the Discoverer

Few historical figures’ reputations have varied so much as that of ChristopherColumbus. In the Program and Rules setting up the competition in 1928 to designthe lighthouse, Columbus is called “the great historical figure” whose achievementwas “stupendous.” In an echo almost a century later, the US White House underPresident Trump issued a “Proclamation on Columbus Day, 2020,” stating that “wecelebrate Columbus Day to commemorate the great Italian who opened a newchapter in world history and to appreciate his enduring significance to the WesternHemisphere.” It calls Columbus an “intrepid hero” and laments that “sadly, inrecent years, radical activists have sought to undermine Christopher Columbus’slegacy.” According to the Trump administration’s proclamation, “these extremistsseek to replace discussion of his vast contributions with talk of failings, his discov-eries with atrocities, and his achievements with transgressions.”35 But the growinglist of places in the United States switching their October holiday from ColumbusDay to Indigenous Peoples Day shows that there is certainly no longer generalagreement on the assessment of Columbus as simply a heroic discoverer, if ever

29 French, “Pope’s Mass at Dominican Monument to Columbus,” http://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/es/homilies/1992/documents/hf_jpii_hom_19921011_v-centenario.html.

30 Viala, The Post-Columbus Syndrome, 131–33; Harding, “Rocky Course for Lighthouse in Eye ofStorm.”

31 Ramırez, Colonial Phantoms, 120.32 Harding, “Rocky Course for Lighthouse in Eye of Storm,” 12.33 Kevin Rafferty, “A Gloomy Monument to Columbus,” Financial Times, August 29, 1992.34 “Decouverte Saint-Domingue, Colomb chez Pharaon,” Le Monde, October 3, 1992.35 “Proclamation on Columbus Day, 2020,” issued on October 9, 2020.


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there was.36 The schoolchildren we encounter on our travels to Santo Domingo arestill eager to tell us that Columbus “discovered” their country, but historians can nolonger ignore the disastrous consequences of Columbus’s voyages for the peoplesof the Americas who were there when he arrived, and for the African and Indig-enous people who were enslaved to provide labor for the European colonists.

The quincentenary of Columbus’ first voyage in 1992 sparked many historicalreassessments of Columbus and his legacy, and some observers did raise objec-tions to the Faro a Colon. Demonstrators in the Dominican Republic said that itwas an insult to the Indigenous people who were killed and to African peoplewho were enslaved beginning with Columbus’s administration.37 They wereright. This monument was designed to celebrate Columbus on a monumentalscale while ignoring the enslavement and dispossession of colonization and itsongoing painful legacy of inequality.

Alternatively, there is a way to see this monument as providing a true reflectionof Columbus’s impact. A historically and historiographically informed interpreta-tion of the Columbus Lighthouse can show us the violence and greed that werecentral to the colonization of the Americas.

Inscriptions on the Faro a Colon. (Photo by authors)

36 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “Good Day, Columbus,” in Silencing the Past: the Power and Pro-duction of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015), 108–40.

37 French, “Pope’s Mass at Dominican Monument to Columbus.”


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First, consider its placement. The Faro is not actually located where Columbusfirst made landfall in the Americas (which was probably on one of the islands in theBahamas), nor where he built his first settlement on the island of Hispaniola (whichwas on the north shore of what is now Haiti). The Faro is in the wrong location. Butthen, so was Columbus. Columbus sailed west from Europe not to find the Amer-icas, but to reach Asia. Based on fifteenth-century European understandings ofgeography that went back to Ptolemy and beyond, Columbus expected to get toAsia if he sailed westward across the Atlantic, and he did not anticipate a largelandmass in the way.38 He knew that the Earth was spherical, but he underesti-mated its circumference.39 When he landed in what we now call the Caribbean,Columbus asked the inhabitants for information about China and Japan. Notfinding either place, he tried to cast what he did see in the best possible light forthe monarchs in whose names he was claiming possession. Columbus said ina letter that he wrote during his return crossing to Europe that the islands werefertile, the mountains lofty, the trees and fruits and plants “a wonder to behold onaccount of their beautiful variety.” In this paradise of a place lived people whowere well built, intelligent, timorous and without iron weapons, guileless andgenerous with all they had. Columbus even reassured his readers not once, buttwice, that he had found no monsters.40 With this letter, Columbus was makingthe case that his sponsors should continue to invest in what would surely be aneasy claim of overlordship for Spain. Not that Columbus understood where hewas; he continued to think he had landed in Asia. By his third voyage across theAtlantic, Columbus began to consider the possibility that he was on a differentcontinental mass, but on his fourth trip he thought that perhaps he was seeingMalaysia.41 Columbus’s basic geographical confusion is well represented by themisplacement of his lighthouse.

His remains might have been misplaced too. It’s possible that the body ofColumbus lies in the Faro. Someone’s probably does—the remains that wereexhumed from Santo Domingo’s cathedral in 1877. But it is unclear exactly whosebones these are, and the Dominican authorities have so far refused to open thetomb to try and find out. The movements of the bones are both confusing andcontested. Columbus died in Valladolid, Spain, in 1506, and his body was buried inSeville. Some years later, his daughter-in-law had the remains moved to the cathe-dral in Santo Domingo, as Columbus had wished. Spain ceded the colony to France

38 The Behaim Globe, or “Erdapfel,” is an excellent illustration of what Europeans thoughtabout the commercial possibilities of global sea travel in 1492. See Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A NewHistory of the Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1996), 295–301.

39 William D. Phillips Jr., “Columbus, Christopher,” in The Oxford Companion to WorldExploration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

40 “Columbus’ letter to Santangel,” in New Iberian World: A Documentary History of the Dis-covery and Settlement of Latin America to the Early 17th century, Volume II, ed. John H. Parry andRobert G. Keith (New York: Times Books, 1984), 58–62.

41 Stewart A. Weaver, Exploration: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2015), 55.


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in 1795, and Spanish officials took the bones to Havana. In 1898, after Cuba won itsindependence from Spain, the remains in Havana were transferred back to Seville.This is the provenance claimed by the cathedral in Seville for the bones it assumes arethe remains of Columbus. The people who found the lead casket in the Cathedral ofSanto Domingo in 1877 thought differently. They interpreted an abbreviated inscrip-tion on the casket’s lid to mean that it contained the remains of Christopher Colum-bus, and they figured that the bones that had earlier been removed to Havana wereactually those of Diego, Christopher’s son. Those who argue that Columbus’s re-mains are in Seville point to results of a DNA analysis showing that the bones thereare those of someone from the Columbus family.42 It is still possible that both sidesare right, that some of Columbus’s bones lie in Seville and some in Santo Domingo,but the confusion about where exactly the explorer’s bones lie in death is a suitableecho for that explorer’s confusion about where exactly he had travelled in life.

Next, consider the displacement caused by the construction of the Faro. It wasbuilt where people had their homes, a reminder that Columbus took credit fordiscovering a place where many people already lived, and then proceeded todisplace and kill those in the way of colonization. The actions of Columbus andthe conquistadors who followed him led to the deaths of millions and the dispos-session of millions more. Much of the violence was deliberate. According to Co-lumbus’s childhood friend Michele de Cuneo, Columbus had “given” hima captured Indigenous woman. De Cuneo wrote in a letter that when she resistedhis attempts to “take [his] pleasure with her” and “satisfy [his] desire,” he whippedher until she screamed, and bragged that “eventually we came to such terms, Iassure you, that you would have thought she had been brought up in a school forwhores.”43 The island on which the Faro is built endured some of the bloodiestviolence of Columbus’s endeavor. In 1542, the conquistador-turned-Dominican-friar Bartolome de Las Casas described Hispaniola as “the first to suffer the whole-sale slaughter of its people and the devastation and depopulation of the land.”44

Outcries against the colonists’ violence are not just a product of our own age; therewere Spanish settlers in the early years of New Spain who protested too. TheSpanish Dominican friar Antonio de Montesinos delivered a sermon on Hispaniolain 1511 as “the voice of Christ crying in the wilderness” castigating his listeners:“This voice says that you are in mortal sin, that you live and die in it, for the crueltyand tyranny you use in dealing with these innocent people.”45 None of this cruelty

42 Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, The Conquest of History: Spanish Colonialism and NationalHistories in the Nineteenth Century (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 69–75; BessLovejoy, “The Scattered Bones of Columbus,” Lapham’s Quarterly, October 15, 2013.

43 Michele de Cuneo, quoted in Stephanie Wood, “Sexual Violation in the Conquest of theAmericas,” in Sex and Sexuality in Early America, ed. Merril D. Smith (New York: New York Uni-versity Press, 1998), 11.

44 Bartolome de las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, ed. and trans. NigelGriffin (London: Penguin, 1992), 14.

45 Daniel Castro, Another Face of Empire: Bartolome de las Casas, Indigenous Rights, and Eccle-siastical Imperialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 56.


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and tyranny is overtly commemorated in the Faro monument, neither the dispos-session of Indigenous peoples nor the forced transport of Africans across theocean. But with the razing of a neighborhood on the monument’s site, the injusticeof displacement is now part of the Faro’s own history.

The sheer size of the Faro is yet another sense in which the monument repre-sents Columbus. Whether you like it or not, the Columbus Lighthouse is too big todisregard. This exaggerated bulk is a good representation of Columbus in two ways.First, he was a grasping social climber, always ready to exaggerate his importance.In making a voyage westward across the ocean, what he called his “enterprise of theIndies,” Columbus hoped that establishing a sea-route to Asia would secure for himpersonal advancement so that he could rise above his rather humble beginnings asthe son of a weaver and tavern keeper. His plan seemed to be working when KingFerdinand and Queen Isabella promised to name him Admiral of the Ocean Seaand Viceroy and Governor of any lands he might discover.46 His leadership skills,however, were questionable at best. On his first voyage, the captain of one of thethree ships sailed off without Columbus’s permission to explore by himself. Asecond ship ran aground and was wrecked. Not having room for all his men aboardhis only remaining vessel, Columbus left thirty-nine of them behind on Hispaniolaat a hastily constructed fort. When he returned the following year, he found themall dead.47 His next attempted settlement was another disaster that was abandonedwithin five years.48 Once Columbus managed to get something more lasting estab-lished, he proved to be a terrible governor, as the people of his own time knew verywell. He and his two brothers were arrested in 1500 for failure to maintain order inthe colony, and they were sent back to Spain in chains.49 Disastrous thoughColumbus was as an administrator, the historical significance of his landfall in theAmericas is the second way in which the size of the Faro works as a symbol.Columbus did not find a “New World,” but he helped to create one. Starting in1492, sustained links between the two hemispheres brought about the first trulyglobal age, forever changing human cultures, economic organizations, and naturalecosystems.50 The consequences of Columbus’s voyage may sometimes be ugly,but they are undeniably significant.

46 Weaver, Exploration: A Very Short Introduction, 50–51.47 Phillips, “Columbus, Christopher.”48 Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (New York: Alfred A.

Knopf, 2011); Kathleen Deagan, “Colonial Transformation: Euro-American Cultural Genesis in theEarly Spanish American Colonies,” Journal of Anthropological Research 52, no. 2 (1996): 135–60;Higman, A Concise History of The Caribbean.

49 Weaver, Exploration: A Very Short Introduction, 43; Massimo Livi Bacci, “Return To Hispa-niola: Reassessing a Demographic Catastrophe,” Hispanic American Historical Review 83, no. 1 (2003):3–51.

50 Mann, 1493; Higman, A Concise History of The Caribbean; Reinaldo Funes Monzote, “TheColumbian Moment: Politics, Ideology, and Biohistory,” in The Caribbean: A History of the Regionand Its Peoples, ed. Stephan Palmie and Francisco A. Scarano (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,2011), 83–95; Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of1492, 30th Anniversary Edition (Westport: Greenwood Publishing, 2003).


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Finally, consider the Faro’s light. The intended symbolism of beams shooting anenormous cross into the sky is pretty obvious, but it is difficult to understand howthe violence wrought upon Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Africans in thewake of Columbus’s voyage can honestly be seen as enlightening in any way. Yetthe lighthouse reflects Columbus even here. The Faro has pretentions to cast light,but rarely does so, because turning on the Faro’s skyward illumination seems to puttoo much strain on the electrical system and leads to blackouts in the adjacent areas.The lighthouse cannot be turned on, because it drains the light from its surround-ings. The light of Columbus plunges the people into darkness.

With a consideration of the monument’s history in mind, and set against thehistorical record of early modern colonization, the Faro a Colon really couldbecome a “more nearly perfect” symbol for the significance of Christopher Colum-bus in the history of the Americas. Accidentally and in spite of itself, the ColumbusLighthouse communicates a lesson that teaches the consequences of Columbus’svoyage much more truly than the monument’s original planners ever intended: thecolonization of the Americas is a history of misplacement, displacement, graspinggreed, and the extinguishing of many lights.

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Mairi Cowan is an Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, in the Department ofHistorical Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga. She is a historian ofthe late medieval and early modern world, with specializations in the social andreligious histories of Europe and North America.

Christoph Richter is an Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, in the Department ofBiology at the University of Toronto Mississauga. He studies the impacts of humanactivities on mammals in marine and urban environments.

The authors have taken groups of students to the Faro a Colon as part of a studyabroad trip in their course on the history and ecology of the Columbian Exchange.

They would like to thank the editors of The Public Historian and the anonymousreviewers who provided helpful suggestions for our paper; the UTM Abroad Teamfor their support of student travel; the students who study with us; and the peopleof the Dominican Republic.


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