Useful and pleasing features in civic life are to be found in the general "town-planning" of the Latin American town or village. The Spaniards inaugurated the general plan of a central plaza or square, with streets radiating therefrom, and cross streets--the well-known "chequer board" style. It is quite possible to overdo this system, or to adhere too rigidly thereto. But the central plaza, with the church and municipal buildings, chief shops and so forth around it, is a convenient arrangement, whilst the institution of the _serenata_ or open-air concert here, on Sunday afternoon and during week-day evenings, brings the people together and creates a pleasing atmosphere, and is, in fact, a social amenity of value. The plaza is the pulse of the locality. It is, of course, to be recollected that the climate generally permits such amenities. Also, as the roads cease on the outskirts of the place, there is really nowhere else for the inhabitants to take exercise on foot. We should not like to sacrifice our typical English village, with its High Street and church on the hill, to this more stereotyped plan, but the amenities of the plaza might be much more widely copied. It has its nucleus in the village green, but the social atmosphere is lacking in this last. The traveller in the cities and towns of Spanish America finds himself, often without knowing or analysing the cause, in an atmosphere quaint, restful and pleasing. He seems transplanted to an old-world or semi-mediaeval environment, as of some more ancient or remote place of European lands where the vulgarizing hand of the commercial age is as yet unknown. Looking around and above him he finds the sensation is imparted by the buildings, the façades of the streets, the churches and the general disposition architecturally of the place. It is the atmosphere and influence of the old Spanish Colonial architecture. Notwithstanding the very considerable extent and interest of this field, few writers on Spanish America appear to have made any broad study of the subject, or at least to have set down much in the way of description of what is so noteworthy and important a feature of life in these widely-scattered communities, but it is a matter worthy of some study.