Convento de los Dominicos (Dominican Convent), San Juan

Juan Ponce de León donated the land to the Dominican friars, and they built their ovens and set to work. Construction on the convent began in 1523. The church alongside it came later, canonically founded in 1532. For centuries the two buildings functioned together; when the Spanish government secularized the convents in the 19th century, a shared wall became a dividing one. After 1898 the convent passed to American governmental use, then to the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña in 1960, which reopened it as the Galería Nacional in 2007. The gallery closed in 2013. The building endures.