"First things first, to facilitate the conversation with your taxi driver: XVI means “sixteen,” as you’d guess, and is pronounced “dieciséis,” as you might remember from the first week of Spanish. The number is key to the concept behind the Hotel Casas del XVI, a chic colonial-style hotel located in the historic center of Santo Domingo. Sixteen isn’t the address, or the number of rooms: it’s the century that the hotel evokes and celebrates — the birth of what’s now considered the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement in the Americas." - Tablet Hotels