The idea was born in 1852, when Dominican historian Antonio Delmonte y Tejada proposed erecting a monument to Columbus in the city he had founded. It was a modest suggestion for what would become anything but modest. In 1914, an American named William Ellis began promoting the concept of a monumental beacon in Santo Domingo to the press. By 1923, the Fifth International Conference in Chile had decreed that all governments and peoples of the Americas should cooperate to build it. The international design competition, held in Brazil in 1931, drew entries from nearly every corner of the globe. A young Scottish architect named Joseph Lea Gleave won. His design was audacious: a cross-shaped structure lying horizontal, massive enough to be visible from the air, with light beams powerful enough to project a crucifix into the night sky. The ambition was staggering. The funding was not. By 1950, only eight countries had contributed a combined total of less than $15,000.

The Dominican government dug the foundation in 1948, unwilling to wait for international generosity that showed no sign of arriving. Then political instability froze everything. For nearly four decades, the site sat dormant - a hole in the ground representing a promise no one seemed able to keep. Construction did not resume until 1986, under President Joaquin Balaguer, who saw the approaching quincentennial of Columbus's 1492 voyage as both deadline and opportunity. Dominican architect Teofilo Carbonell supervised the resurrection of Gleave's decades-old design, adapted now to serve as more than a mausoleum. Balaguer wanted exhibitions from countries across the Americas and beyond, a permanent collection showcasing cultural heritage from every participating nation. The total cost reached approximately $70 million, funded largely by the Dominican Republic and other Latin American states. When the monument opened in 1992, exactly 500 years after Columbus first made landfall in the Caribbean, it had taken 140 years to travel from idea to concrete.

The question at the heart of the Columbus Lighthouse is deceptively simple: whose remains actually rest inside? Columbus died in Valladolid, Spain, in 1506. His remains were moved to Seville, then to Santo Domingo's cathedral, then - according to Spain - to Havana in 1795 when Spain ceded the colony, and finally back to Seville in 1898. But the Dominican Republic has always insisted that the Spanish took the wrong bones from the cathedral. In 1877, workers discovered a lead box behind the altar of Santo Domingo's cathedral inscribed with Columbus's name. Those remains are the ones now housed in the lighthouse. DNA testing conducted on the Seville remains in 2006 confirmed that at least some bones there belong to Columbus. The Dominican Republic has declined to allow similar testing on its set. Once a year, on Columbus Day, the crypt opens and visitors can view the remains through glass. The ambiguity is perhaps fitting for a man whose own origins remain debated - born in Genoa, possibly Portuguese, claimed by half a dozen nations in death as in life.

Whatever one thinks of the politics, the building itself is an experience. The cross-shaped footprint is enormous - longer than two football fields, wide enough to house exhibition halls from dozens of countries within its arms. Inside, objects range from a boat donated by Cuba to Colombian jewelry, each nation's contribution reflecting its own relationship to the Age of Exploration and its aftermath. The U.S. exhibition, as writer Tony Horwitz noted in 2008, contained a few small photographs of Independence Day celebrations alongside poster-sized reproductions of newspaper front pages from September 11, 2001 - a jarring juxtaposition that says more about American self-perception than about Columbus. At night, when the lights are activated, beams project upward from the roof to form a luminous cross in the sky. The power required is substantial, and in a country where electricity has historically been unreliable, the lights do not always shine. When they do, the cross is visible from neighboring Puerto Rico, a ghostly intersection hanging above the Caribbean that manages to be both spectacular and unsettling.