Abstract
The Spanish Colonial period in the Indies extends from 1492 to 1898, when the last colonies - Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines - attained their independence. The Philippines depended on the Spanish Crown from 1521, the date of the first settlement on the Island of Cebu. More than two hundred new cities were founded along the archipelago with the traditional grid structure, but some with other urban typologies have not been studied before. At the beginning they were mostly located on the coast and later became port cities, but the ensuing exploration of inland territories led to the construction of new settlements, later linked through a network of roads, railroads and navigational routes. Based upon the ancient cartography of the Philippines that the authors have recently discovered in the principal Spanish repositories, the present article studies these unexplored and unpublished fields of research, analyzing the different urban patterns, as well as the territorial structures that were consolidated during the Spanish Colonial period in the Archipelago.
