The southwest of the island, where Barahona lies today, was inhabited before the conquest by the Taíno people, organized into chiefdoms in the land they called Quisqueya or Haití. The region, with its Bahoruco range, its coasts and its great lake depression, was part of that Indigenous world. The caves of the area preserve Taíno rock art, and the very name of Lake Enriquillo and of many geographic features harks back to that heritage.
The Taíno of the southwest lived from fishing, hunting, gathering and farming, adapting to an environment more arid and mountainous than that of other regions of the island. The Bahoruco range, with its forests and natural refuges, would shortly become the setting for one of the most significant episodes of Indigenous resistance to the Spanish conquest.
After the arrival of the Europeans at the end of the 15th century, the Taíno population of the whole island collapsed within a few decades through wars, forced labor and disease. But in the mountains of the southwest, that resistance had a protagonist who would go down in history and give the region its name: the cacique Enriquillo.
The most famous episode in the history of the southwest is the rebellion of the cacique Enriquillo, one of the earliest and most successful Indigenous uprisings against Spanish rule in the Americas. Enriquillo was a Taíno cacique educated by the friars who, around 1519, rose up against the abuses of the encomienda system and took refuge with his followers in the rugged mountains of the Bahoruco range, in the southwest.
For more than a decade, Enriquillo and his people resisted in the mountains, eluding and defeating the Spanish expeditions sent to subdue them, in a guerrilla war that exploited their knowledge of the terrain. Their resistance became so persistent that, finally, around 1533, the Spanish Crown chose to negotiate peace, granting Enriquillo and his people a degree of freedom: an exceptional outcome in the history of the conquest.
The figure of Enriquillo was immortalized in the 19th century by the Dominican writer Manuel de Jesús Galván in his celebrated novel 'Enriquillo', which turned him into a national symbol of Indigenous dignity and resistance. The region's great salt lake bears his name —Lake Enriquillo— in his honor, perpetuating the memory of that cacique who defied the empire from the mountains of the Bahoruco.
During the colonial centuries, the southwest was one of the most secluded and hard-to-reach regions of the island, far from the Santo Domingo axis. The city of Santa Cruz de Barahona was founded in the early 19th century, around 1802, amid the dispute among the colonial powers over the island, at a time when the Spanish part had passed into French hands. Its founding is attributed to initiatives linked to the period of French rule and, later, its consolidation to Haitian and Dominican administration.
Barahona grew as an agricultural and port center of the southwest, in a region devoted to agriculture: sugarcane, mountain coffee, the fruits of the dry forest. Its port served to ship out the area's production. But, compared with other regions of the country, the southwest long remained a relatively poor, isolated and sparsely populated area, marked by the harshness of its geography and its distance from the centers of power.
In the 20th century, the region saw the development of the local sugar industry, with mills that provided employment and energized the economy, though without reaching the scale of other areas like La Romana. Barahona province established itself as the head of the southwest, with its city as the main service center of a vast region of mountains, coasts and semi-desert.
One of the most unique chapters of Barahona's recent history is that of larimar, a semi-precious stone of a sky-blue color unique in the world. Although there are accounts of earlier finds, the stone was 'rediscovered' and began to be mined and popularized in the 1970s, when its deposit was located in the Bahoruco range, in the Dominican southwest.
What's extraordinary about larimar is that it's a variety of blue pectolite that, as far as is known, is found only in this very specific area of the planet, making it a stone exclusive to the Dominican Republic. Its name, according to tradition, combines that of the daughter of one of the people who promoted its commercialization ('Larissa') with the word 'mar' (sea), in reference to its sea-blue color.
The mining of larimar gave the region an identity and a source of income of its own. The mines of the Las Filipinas area, where the stone is extracted by hand in tunnels dug into the mountain, and the workshops where it's worked and turned into jewelry, were added to Barahona's heritage. Larimar became a symbol of the country and one of the great attractions of the southwest, forever linking the name of Barahona to that stone the color of the Caribbean.
The southwest's great heritage, and the basis of its current tourism, is its exceptional and little-altered nature. The region concentrates a set of internationally recognized natural wonders: Lake Enriquillo, the largest lake in the Antilles, salty and below sea level, inhabited by crocodiles and iguanas; the Sierra de Bahoruco, a sanctuary of endemic birds and orchids; and, farther south, Jaragua National Park, with the legendary Bahía de las Águilas and the Oviedo Lagoon.
This ensemble was recognized by UNESCO as the Jaragua-Bahoruco-Enriquillo Biosphere Reserve, one of the areas of greatest ecological value in the Caribbean, for its biodiversity, its endemism and the variety of its ecosystems (from montane cloud forest to semi-desert and coasts). The region has also been promoted as a geopark for its unique geology.
Unlike the east, the southwest of Barahona did not experience a resort or mass-tourism boom. Its tourism, still incipient, is geared toward ecotourism, adventure and nature: birdwatching, swimming in freshwater spots, visits to the larimar mines, exploration of national parks and unspoiled beaches. That undeveloped character is, paradoxically, its greatest appeal and, at the same time, its great challenge: to find a sustainable tourism model that harnesses the region's beauty without destroying what makes it unique. In that tension between conservation and development, the future of Barahona and the Dominican southwest is at stake.