Seven centuries later, when Alvarado entered the country, the fractured tribes of the west controlled the highlands and preoccupied the conquistadors. The Spanish ignored the possibility of settling here until the devastating 1773 earthquake forced them to flee Antigua and establish a new capital. The new city was named Nueva Guatemala de la Asuncion by royal decree and was officially inaugurated on January 1, 1776. The splendour of the former capital at Antigua was hard to emulate, however, and the new city's growth was steady but by no means dramatic. An 1863 census listed just 1206 residences and the earliest photographs show the city was still little more than a large village with a theatre, a government palace and a fort. One of the factors retarding the city's growth was the existence of a major rival, Quetzaltenango, though when it too was razed to the ground by a massive earthquake in 1902, many wealthy families moved to the capital, finally establishing it as the country's primary city.

Since 1918, Guatemala City has grown at an incredible rate, mainly due to an influx of rural immigrants. The steady flight from the fields, characteristic of developing countries, was aided and abetted by a chronic shortage of land and, in the 1970s and 1980s, by internal refugees escaping rural violence. Many of these displaced people, for the most part Maya, feel unwanted and unwelcome in the city, and the divisions that cleave Guatemalan society are at their most acute in the capital's crumbling streets. While the wealthy elite sip coffee in air-conditioned shopping malls and plan their next visit to Miami, swathes of the city have been left to disintegrate into a threatening treeless tangle of fume-choked streets, largely devoid of any kind of life after dark. A small army of street children live rough, scratching a living from begging, prostitution and petty crime, and there is strong evidence of "social cleansing" by the security forces. Glass skyscrapers rise alongside colonial churches and shoeless widows peddle cigarettes and sweets to designer-clad nightclubbers. Guatemala City has, in many ways, much more in common with Cairo or Bogota than with the rest of the country.