ABSTRACT
After falling once to an attack by Indians, weathering a series of eight serious earthquakes and suffering a huge landslide between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the Spanish Captain General of Santiago de Guatemala gave the order in 1773 for the site to be abandoned and the city to be relocated for the third time to safer terrain. The citizenry objected to the decision, but the relocation began nonetheless in 1775 and a new capital, Nueva Guatemala de la Asuncion, was founded. Many people, however, still refused to abandon the old site, now known as Antigua, whereupon the authorities forcibly closed the city's remaining stores in 1779. All these efforts notwithstanding, the old site was almost immediately repopulated and continues to exist today as one of Guatemala's major tourist attractions (Tobriner 1980: 14-15).
