Were this a short story, this would not be good use of a first paragraph; as a novel, you might get away with it -- I've certainly seen worse -- but the second paragraph better be a humdinger. Still, you'd be better off starting with Al Mecina, the person, rather than Al Mecina, the city.

I'm not going to defend my opening paragraph, since I'd rather get more feedback, instead of me trying to justify what could very well be a bad or questionable opening. (I'd already be published if my stuff were perfect. :)

But I do want to point out a couple things:
1) The very next paragraph does introduce our hero, and the narrative shifts to 3rd person. Again, that's not a justification. I'd have included the next paragraph if it would have fit in the 13 line limit.

2) Kolona: The setting is a middle eastern derivitive, and "El Mecina" sounds more central/south american. "Al Mecina" is a working name for the moment, until I can come up with something a little more creative. (sounds too much like Al Medina, a coastal city in Saudi Arabia.). But the jist of your post is duly noted. :)

Sometimes I let my desire to be terse get away with me (and you all thought it was my tendancy to be verbose that I fail to control--hah! I never have problems controlling my loquacity). I should have added, "or is this a prologue."

For a prologue, this would be an acceptable POV choice, as long as you used the full length of the prologue to imply a narrator character. The art of doing this is fairly complex, Tolkien does a masterful job of it, LeGuin also does it well (and with less labor) in her EarthSea Trilogy.

Naming the city 'Al Mecina' isn't the problem, the problem is that you shouldn't have started the work with the name of an unknown city in the first place (heh heh, get it?). If you are going to do an implied narrator prologue, then you must start with some varient of "long ago and far away...." This signals to the reader that this story is being told using an implied narrator character. If this is a conventional first chapter in a POV work, then you should start with the name of the POV character (alternatively, you can start with something immediately identifiable to the reader which the POV character is experiencing--i.e. "The chaotic hubbub of the market street combined with the pungent aromas of the wares to assault Khalaam's sensibilities").

Remember, the way you engage the reader's interest is by introducing them to an interesting character as soon as possible. Humans are interested in...other humans (that's where cities come from, after all). If this chapter is going to be in a regular POV, then you are unnecessarily delaying the moment at which the main character is introduced. If you are going to establish an interesting narrator character (and this is a wonderful and sadly neglected artform--it is such a pleasure to read those works of long ago...), then you have to take the time to do that properly, and really let your narrator character's 'voice' (idiom, perspective, biases, and especially wit) show through and color the narration.

Remember, being truly creative is a matter of fully understanding why you use certain elements of narration in your story, and using them for effect. If you're just unconsciously cobbling it together out of what you've read in other works...that's generally called 'derivative', and not in the good (or at least neutral), mathmatical sense.

Now, the main (good) reason for writing a work with a strong implied (or even explicit) narrator character is because the available main character's would not be suitable as POV character's, either because they are unsympathetic for much or all of the story, or because they are all too dull (in mentality or personality), or (and this one is quite common) because none of them is present for the entire action of the story. Now in the last case, it is frequently the practice to simply switch from one POV to another (usually at chapter breaks) or to use a full omniscient POV. !!!WARNING!!! Full Omniscient is every bit as difficult as it sounds, the narrator must know everything and tell the reader anything that has any bearing on the story.