Tour Audio a Città del Guatemala

Guatemala City was founded in 1776 as a replacement for Antigua Guatemala, destroyed by the catastrophic 1773 Santa Marta earthquake. It sits in the Valle de la Ermita at 1,500 meters elevation, and on clear days you can see four stratovolcanoes: Agua, Fuego, Pacaya, and Acatenango. Pacaya erupts with enough regularity that ash advisories are a routine part of city life. The geology here is not subtle -- a 100-meter-deep sinkhole opened in a residential zone in 2007, swallowing an entire block.

The historic Zone 1 holds the Metropolitan Cathedral, a neoclassical structure begun in 1782 and completed in 1871, and the National Palace of Culture -- a jade-green government building from the 1940s whose murals depict Guatemalan history in layers that the official version often preferred to leave out.

Below Zone 1 lie the ruins of Kaminaljuyu, a Maya city occupied for 2,000 years before the Spanish arrived. Its ceremonial mounds are now scattered across Zone 7, partly flattened by a neighborhood that grew up around them without quite noticing what was underfoot.