La arquitectura de las construcciones militares históricas de Santiago de Cubarecuperación, restauración y gestión patrimonial

Resumen

The irruption of the Spanish empire in America at the end of the XV century, led to the start of a process of expansion which resulted in the development of a vast defensive system in the new territories. The geographical and strategic location of Cuba in the Caribbean, granted him the privilege of being one of the commercial centers of the region from the XVI century, generating the concentration of a strong military device, which ceased in the nineteenth century when war with the Spanish-Cuban-American closed the chapter of the Spanish empire in America. Vestiges of this immense colonial defensive system, have come to the present as everlasting samples of five centuries of military constructions, have great historical value-patrimonial are characterized by the diversity of their typologies and monumentality, representing the evolution of the military architecture in Latin America. In Santiago de Cuba is account with one of its most important exponents, the San Pedro de la Roca Castle, constructed by Juan Bautista Antonelli from 1638 and that by the wealth that treasures was included in the List of World Heritage, as a World Heritage Cultural Landscape in 1997. This thesis defines the historical premises, conceptual and contextual, as well as the orderly procedures to characterize the genesis and development of the military architecture of Santiago de Cuba from a thorough historiographical study, which facilitates subsequent restoration actions, is the essence of this work. For this has been done an analysis of the Cuban and Spanish sources that underpin the importance of the Morro Castle and its defensive system, making possible the updating of existing information so far on the subject. It has characterized the architecture and its current status to determine damage and possible conservation actions on the basis of the definition of the values of its components, with a management strategy and management of the site, which allow the final value of these assets as a single whole and indissoluble. The documental search was aimed at expanding the level of knowledge on the constructive evolution and behavior of the typological of San Pedro de la Roca Castle, such as maximum exponent of defensive constructions of the city throughout the centuries