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The arrival of Spaniards in the Caribbean islands introduced to the region the practice of applying pigments onto buildings. The pigments that remain on these buildings may provide data on their historical evolution and essential information for tackling restoration tasks. In this study, a 17th-century mural painting located in the Cathedral of Santo Domingo on the Hispaniola island of the Caribbean is characterised via UV–VIS–NIR, Raman and FTIR spectroscopy, XRD and SEM/EDX. The pigments are found in the older Chapel of Our Lady of Candelaria, currently Chapel of Our Lady of Mercy. The chapel was built in the 17th century by black slave brotherhood and extended by Spaniards. During a recent restoration process of the chapel, remains of mural painting appeared, which were covered by several layers of lime. Five colours were identified: ochre, green, red, blue and white. Moreover, it was determined that this mural painting was made before the end of the 18th century, because many of the materials used were no longer used after the industrialisation of painting. However, since both rutile and anatase appear as a white pigment, a restoration may have been carried out in the 20th century, and it has been painted white.

This paper evaluates the indoor temperature and relative humidity of three construction systems in a Dominican social housing scheme, located in different micro-climates present in the Dominican Republic (DR). For the latter, we used DesignBuilder to model the most common type of social housing (S1). In addition, we have also modelled two other improved construction systems (S2 and S3), which have been the result of two different studies, which were conducted in DR. The simulations were carried out in 10 cities. These cities belong to the following five micro-climates: tropical wet Savanna, tropical wet rainforest, tropical wet jungle, dry semiarid and wet temperate. In this article, we have evaluated the construction systems’ performance in the context of thermal conditions inherent to DR. The latter has been done to verify which of the evaluated construction systems is the most adequate for each micro-climate. For this, we determined the average operating interior temperatures and relative humidities for each construction system. We conclude that Samples S2 and S3 show the lowest temperatures in warm climates, while Sample S1 shows improved performance in colder climates. S1 exhibits the lowest values of relative humidities, followed by S3, while S2 presents the highest values.

Colour always played a role in the human evolutionary process and has been used as a way of expression. But the time, the lack of maintenance and abandonment, the lack of studies related to the presence of polychromy in architecture and the nineteenth-century idea of eliminating building plasters to expose stone and brick have caused many to ignore and forgotten the presence of colour in historical buildings. In most cases disappear leaving only traces of colours. For this reason the aim of this research is study the polychromy on stone of a 16th century gothic Portal in the Cathedral of Santo Domingo. Analyses were performed using non-destructive techniques as Transmission Polarized Light Microscopy (PLM), Fourier-Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR), Scanning Electron Microscopy / Energy Dispersive Elemental Analysis X-Ray (SEM/EDX), Gas Chromatography (GC) and X-Ray Diffraction (XRD). To determinate the colour was used a CIELAB System and Munsell Colour System. In conclusion patinas yellow, ochre, red, green and blue colours; and pigmented successive layers of plaster and lime was found. Remains of these layers of polychromies are also spread throughout many areas of the Cathedral.