Guatemala City, Guatemala

Guatemala City is the capital and political and cultural hub of the country of Guatemala and is the largest city in Central America. Guate, as it is locally known, was founded to replace the former Spanish colonial capital of Antigua, which was been destroyed in a devastating 1773 earthquake. Although Guatemala City served for many years as the seat of power from which the Spanish oversaw their regional empire, few traces remain of the city's colonial past. In recent decades, social upheavals have led to massive migrations to the capital; as a result, in 2018 Guatemala City was home to about a million people, with nearly three million in the greater urban area.

Landscape

Located at an elevation of about 1,500 meters (4,900 feet), Guatemala City sprawls over a large valley in the midst of Guatemala's rugged central highlands. Scattered throughout these highlands are some thirty-three volcanoes, including Volcán de Agua (Agua Volcano), the forested 3,760-meter-tall (12,336-foot) cone of which is visible from all points in the capital. Although most of the thirty-three volcanoes are extinct, some remain active, including Pacaya, located 30 kilometers (19 miles) south of the capital's center. A 2010 eruption of the Pacaya volcano complex showered tons of volcanic ash on Guatemala City, forcing the evacuation of several communities and the closure of the capital's airport runways.

Guatemala City is laid out according to a grid pattern. Streets that run north and south are dubbed avenidas; those that run east or west are known as calles. The capital is also subdivided into twenty-two numbered zones. Zone 1 contains the city's oldest churches and public buildings, many of them constructed in an elegant neoclassical style during the period of Spanish domination. Although long neglect has led to the decay or the collapse of many of the original structures, preservation efforts have been undertaken to protect what remains of the zone's colonial-era heritage.

Guatemala City features a mountain climate. Temperatures usually range between 17 degrees Celsius (36 degrees Fahrenheit) and 23 degrees Celsius (71 degrees Fahrenheit). The rainy season brings regular afternoon and evening downpours from May through October, while the dry season runs from November through April.

Guatemala has been extremely affected by climate change. The country has experienced increased temperatures, more frequent flooding and droughts, and extreme weather. These changes have increased the risk of food and water insecurity among Guatemala's poor.

People

The population of the greater metropolitan area of Guatemala City was approximately 3.036 million in 2022, according to the CIA World Factbook, with an annual nationwide urbanization rate of 2.59 percent estimated for the period 2020 to 2025. Until the mid-1990s, most migrants moved to Guatemala City as refugees from a brutal civil war that had raged in the countryside for more than three decades. The end of the war in 1996—and the upsurge of foreign investment and economic growth it made possible—accelerated this migration trend among rural citizens. Many rural people continue to perceive Guatemala City as an escape from the chronic poverty and harsh living conditions associated with a traditional agricultural lifestyle.

Dreams of a more prosperous life often go unfulfilled in the capital, where more than 40 percent of all residents live in poverty. Guatemala City's shantytowns, which encircle the city, reflect two key realities of Guatemalan life that permit high rates of poverty and some of the region's worst socioeconomic conditions to persist: the concentration of most of the country's arable land and industry in the hands of a small number of elite families, and the negligible government spending on public health, education, and housing. The lack of socioeconomic opportunity and the oppressive living conditions in the city play a significant role in the high rates of crime that plague Guatemala City.

Most of the capital's residents are Roman Catholic or Protestant. The large-scale rural-to-urban migration of various Maya peoples to Guatemala City has encouraged the incorporation of traditional indigenous rites into the practice of Christian worship. The migration pattern has also brought increasing numbers of speakers of Guatemala's more than twenty-two indigenous languages to the capital, although Spanish remains the official language. English is also widely spoken in commercial, business, and educational settings.

Economy

Although in the 2010s, Guatemala could lay claim to the highest gross national product (GDP) in Central America, Guatemala City's economy reflects the effects of Guatemalan society's deep, largely race-based socioeconomic divide. The inequities in economic opportunity are not as pronounced in the capital as they are in the country's rural agricultural sector, which employs about a third of the Guatemalan national workforce.

For the vast majority of these low-wage workers, many of whom are of Indigenous ethnicity, the possibilities of achieving economic independence are few and far between. It is estimated that 65 percent of the country's best farmlands are controlled by less than 2 percent of the population and that more than three-quarters of Guatemala's farms are squeezed into just 10 percent of the available land. This distribution of vast numbers of rural people to tiny, unprofitable plots continues to fuel the migration of rural Guatemalans to the capital.

The migration of largely uneducated people to Guatemala City has created a vast pool of cheap, unskilled labor that powers the country's manufacturing sector, most of which is concentrated in and around the capital. This rapidly growing workforce is predominantly female and young. Major components of this sector include sugar, food, and beverage processing as well as the manufacture of furniture, kitchen wares, textiles, automobile tires, pharmaceutical products, and other consumer goods.

The availability of cheap labor has attracted substantial foreign investment to Guatemalan factories. However, international critics have suggested that investors are forcing an exploited work force to tolerate low wages and oppressive working conditions as a result of the economic desperation of the workers.

In January 2024, Bernardo Arevalo was inaugurated as president and promised to fight poverty and corruption. However, many fear that his powerful political opponents will stall his progress. In early 2024, experts predicted that Guatemala's gross domestica product (GDP) that year will drop to 3.3 percent from 3.5 percent in 2023.

Landmarks

Many of Guatemala City's most notable landmarks, such as the presidential palace and the Metropolitan Cathedral, are located within zone one, which encapsulates the capital's historic center. Zone one also contains the National Palace of Culture, which, besides housing numerous government offices, is famed for its beautiful stained glass windows, paintings, and sculptures.

Guatemala City is home to several noteworthy museums, including the National Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, which is dedicated to the study of the native peoples of the Americas. The city is also home to the Ixchel Indigenous Costume Museum, which offers exhibits of traditional costumes and textiles from throughout the country. The Popol Vuh Archeology Museum, which showcases artifacts from the three major periods of ancient Maya civilization, and the National History Museum, which documents Guatemalan history since the nation officially achieved independence in 1821, can also be found in Guatemala City. Other museums in the city include the Natural History Museum, which features exhibitions of Guatemalan flora, fauna, mineralogy, and paleontology; the Miguel Ángel Asturias Cultural Center, which houses a museum of antique weapons; and the National Museum of Modern Art, which features a large collection of contemporary Guatemalan painting and sculptures.

Guatemala City is also celebrated for its churches. The Church of Our Lady of Mercy, which is noted for its colonial-era paintings and its gilded altarpieces, survived the earthquake that destroyed the old capital of Antigua and was transferred to the new capital. The capital's best-known church, however, is the neoclassical-styled Metropolitan Cathedral. Construction began on the Cathedral in 1782 but was not completed for another eighty-five years. Its interior is rich in religious paintings dating to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, some of which were originally brought to the New World by the Spanish conquistadors.

Underneath a large stretch of the busiest sections of Guatemala City are the ruins of an ancient Maya city. Excavations at the archaeological site of Kaminal Juyu, located in the heart of the capital, have yielded a trove of artifacts and knowledge pertaining to ancient Maya sculpture, ceramics, architecture, and funerary practices.

History

Guatemala City was established within two years of the 1773 destruction by earthquake of the former capital, which came to be known as Antigua Guatemala, or Old Guatemala. The spacious new capital was largely built with materials salvaged from the ruins of the old capital. With Guatemala's 1821 declaration of independence from centuries of Spanish colonial domination, Guatemala City became the seat of power from which a succession of dictators ruled the nation.

The ruling elite's entrenched grip on power created social tensions that eventually erupted into a civil war that lasted for thirty-six years. By the time a peace accord was brokered in 1996, an estimated two hundred thousand Guatemalans—mostly in rural areas—had died as a result of the military government's brutal counterinsurgency campaign against leftist guerilla uprisings. The Guatemalan government has acknowledged the massive human rights abuses perpetrated by its predecessors. Its efforts, however, to address the inequities still woven into the capital's social fabric and economic life have been slow in producing significant change.

Bibliography

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