Pueblo Viejo National Park
national Park in the Dominican Republic

The Archaeological and Historical National Park of Pueblo Viejo, La Vega (also known as the National Park of Concepción de la Vega), in the La Vega Province of the Dominican Republic, includes the old city of Concepción de la Vega, and the Pueblo Viejo gold mine. This site was added to the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List on November 21, 2001 in the Cultural category.
History
The city of La Concepción de la Vega was founded as a fortress by Christopher Columbus in 1495. The city was built up around the fortress and the gold mine of Pueblo Viejo, as the extraction of precious metals was the main objective of Columbus' missions to the new world. The town was destroyed by an earthquake on December 2, 1562, and the survivors moved to the present site on the banks of the Camú River.
Mining
The Pueblo Viejo mine is the Dominican Republic's only gold mine, and was at one point the Western Hemisphere's largest and most productive gold mine. The first extraction of gold from this site was undertaken in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, however.
Gallery
References
Sources
Archaeological and Historical National Park of Pueblo Viejo, La Vega (#) – UNESCO World Heritage Centre Accessed 2009-02-26.
Warwick-Ching, T. (1993), The International Gold Trade, Woodhead, ISBN 1-85573-072-3.
“Pueblo Viejo National Park” enters the record as national Park in the Dominican Republic. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Pueblo, Viejo and National can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Pueblo Viejo National Park” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Pueblo, Viejo and National provides the most credible route into that argument.
Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 14, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7258470. Authority coordinates are 19.294, -70.544. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2001, 1495, 1562 and 2009.
A single description cannot reconcile every naming convention, rebuilding phase or administrative transfer associated with a place. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Treat names, boundaries and functions as historically changeable. Maps, plans, inventories and administrative records can clarify what the place meant at different dates.
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Three-step research path
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Pueblo Viejo National Park” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.