Four kilometers south of Chitré lies La Villa de Los Santos, which, as the name suggests, is in Los Santos province. Río La Villa, which the road crosses just northwest of town, marks the border between Los Santos and Herrera provinces.

La Villa de Los Santos is commonly known simply as La Villa. It’s also sometimes called Los Santos, which makes it easy to confuse with the whole province.

Give the guards at the front door of the former statehouse–now museum (south side of the zócalo, no phone, 9:30 a.m.–5 p.m. daily except Mon.) a cheery “buenos días” or “buenas tardes” and step inside. City fathers first built a city hall on the same site in 1576. Repeated earthquakes led to reconstructions, until 1948, when the present building, a modernized and strengthened version of the previous 1884 structure, was finished.

Return to the zócalo’s opposite, north side, for a look at the present cathedral. It replaced the 1550 original, demolished by an earthquake in 1696.

Finished in 1733, with appropriately burly twin bell towers, the present cathedral is distinguished by its Greek-marble main altar, where a polished Italian bronze Virgin of the Ascension is being drawn upward to the cloud-tipped heavenly domain of the Holy Spirit (the dove) and God (the sunburst). Notice the glass images of noble, bearded St. Peter and St. Paul flanking opposite sides of the altar.

Long before Columbus, the Huatulco area was well known to the Aztecs and their predecessors. The name itself, from Aztec words meaning “Land Where a Tree (or Wood) Is Worshipped,” reflects one of Mexico’s most intriguingly persistent legends — that of the Holy Cross of Huatulco.

Where a slender isthmus links East Falkland’s mountainous north with its undulating southern peninsula of Lafonia, about 60 miles west of Stanley, Darwin once had a population of nearly 200 that has fallen to a just a few, as most of the farm buildings and houses shifted to nearby Goose Green in the 1920s.

The peninsula, whose highest point is only 90 meters above sea level, takes its name from Montevideo merchant Samuel Fisher Lafone, founder of what became the Falkland Islands Company; Lafone’s gauchos hunted feral cattle to be slaughtered, their hides processed, at his saladero.

Immediately west of Pebble Island and north of Hill Cove, rarely visited Keppel Island has wildlife including penguins and black-browed albatrosses, no permanent inhabitants, and the most extraordinary history of any offshore island. In the early 1850s, the South American Missionary Society (SAMS) occupied Keppel as part of an ambitious project to make Fuegians abandon their livelihood as mobile hunter-gatherers and become sedentary horticulturalists—evangelizing them, of course, in the process.

One of a number of Wells Fargo museums in California and the West, the Wells Fargo Bank History Museum (420 Montgomery St., 415/396-2619, www.wellsfargohistory.com, Mon.–Fri. 9 a.m.–5 p.m., free) in San Francisco boasts the distinction of sitting on the land of the original Wells Fargo office, opened in 1852.

Here you’ll see an 1860s Concord stagecoach, gold dust and ore from the Gold Rush era, and an exhibit called “Wells Fargo C.S.I. Officers in Pursuit.”

Enjoy the history of the stagecoach line that became one of the country’s most powerful banks.

In 1898, the City of San Francisco created a wonderful new Ferry Building to facilitate commuting from the East Bay. But the rise of the automobile after World War II rendered the gorgeous construction obsolete, and its aesthetic ornamentation was covered over and filled in. But then the roads jammed up and ferry service began again, and the 1989 earthquake led to the removal of the Embarcadero Eyesore (an elevated freeway).

The massive Chinese migration to California began almost as soon as the news of easy gold in the mountain streams made it to East Asia. And despite rampant prejudice and increasingly desperate attempts on the part of “good” Americans to rid their pristine country of these immigrants, the Chinese not only stayed, they persevered and eventually prospered.

Going to Alcatraz (www.nps.gov/alcatraz), one of the most famous landmarks in the City, feels a bit like going to purgatory; this military fortress turned maximum-security prison, nicknamed “The Rock,” has little of warmth or welcome on its craggy forbidding shores.

The fortress became a prison in the 19th century while it still belonged to the military, which used it to house Civil War prisoners. The isolation of the island in the Bay, the frigid waters, and the nasty currents surrounding Alcatraz made it a perfect spot to keep prisoners contained with little hope of escape and near-certain death if the attempt was ever made.