CITIES OF LATIN AMERICA
Little remains of the indigenous urban civilisation, which was largely destroyed by the Spanish con- quest. The influence of the pre-Columbian culture on the urban geography of Latin America is limited to the tendency to build a European settlement on the same geographically favoured sites. as is evident in the locations of inland cities such as Bogota and Mexico City. In general, however, the advent of niercantile colonialism reoriented the inward-looking indigenous urban system onto port-cities such as Lima and Rio de Janeiro. The colonicil legacy influenced much more than the physical location of cities, however. As Griffin and Ford (1983) commented, more than in any other culture region, Latin American cities share a common urban structure that derives from their colonial roots and that persists to the present day.