🇩🇴 Dominican Republic · East coast and Punta Cana
Bávaro is the heart of the Dominican east's resort scene: the beach strip where the big all-inclusive hotels that made famous the destination the world knows as 'Punta Cana' line up one after another. If you picture a Caribbean vacation of white sand, coconut palms, infinity pools, buffets and all-inclusive wristbands, you're most likely picturing, without knowing it, Bávaro beach.
Although administratively 'Punta Cana' and 'Bávaro' are distinct areas, in practice they form a single great tourist destination, and for the traveler the boundaries blur. Bávaro contributes the most emblematic beaches (Playa Bávaro is repeatedly ranked among the world's best), the largest concentration of hotels and, also, the liveliest tourist towns, such as El Cortecito and Los Corales, with their restaurants, bars and life outside the resort.
This guide covers Bávaro with a practical, warm eye: what its beach is like, which excursions leave from here, where to eat outside the hotel, how to get around and what to keep in mind (sargassum, hurricane season, taxis). Whether your plan is not to leave your lounger or to explore the Caribbean east, Bávaro is an unbeatable base.
Bávaro is not a historic city, but a beach area that developed for tourism in the final decades of the 20th century, as part of the great boom of the Dominican east. Until the mid-20th century, this whole coast of La Altagracia province was a remote region of coconut palms, scrubland and unspoiled beaches, sparsely populated and hard to reach, while the historic and religious center of the east was the city of Higüey, seat of the devotion to the Virgin of La Altagracia. Before colonization, the area was part of the Taíno chiefdom of Higüey. The tourist takeoff began in the late 1960s with the pioneers who developed Punta Cana, and accelerated with the opening of the private airport in 1984. From the 1990s and 2000s, Bávaro experienced an explosion of big all-inclusive resort construction —driven largely by Spanish hotel chains— that turned it into the area with the greatest hotel capacity in the country and one of the most successful tourist hubs in the Caribbean. The broader history of the region —from the Taíno to the tourism boom— is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The far eastern tip of the country: Punta Cana, Bávaro and Cap Cana, the most famous resort strip in the Caribbean, alongside Higüey, the nation's religious capital, Bayahíbe and Saona Island in Cotubanamá National Park.
Read the history of La Altagracia →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Before the word 'resort' existed, the coast we now call Bávaro was a land of Taíno, coconut palms and deserted beaches. The island, which its inhabitants called Quisqueya or Haití, was populated by the Taíno people, of Arawak language, organized into large chiefdoms. The eastern region was part of the chiefdom of Higüey, one of the most important on the island, associated with the figure of the cacique Cotubanamá, whose name is now borne by the national park that protects much of this coast and Saona Island.
The Taíno of the east lived from fishing, gathering, hunting and the cultivation of cassava and corn, in villages near the sea and the rivers. They knew intimately these beaches, mangroves, caves and cenotes, which for them were a rich and familiar territory. In the region's caves, Taíno pictographs and petroglyphs survive, bearing witness to their presence and their spiritual world.
After the arrival of the Spanish at the end of the 15th century, the chiefdom of Higüey was one of the last to submit, following clashes in the early 16th century. With the collapse of the Taíno population —through wars, forced labor and, above all, European diseases— and the shift of the colonial axis toward other regions, the whole Dominican east remained for centuries a rural, cattle-raising and sparsely populated area. The coastal strip of Bávaro, in particular, stayed practically uninhabited and hard to reach until well into the 20th century.
During the colonial centuries, while the Bávaro coast was still scrubland and coconut palms, the true center of life in the Dominican east was the town of Salvaleón de Higüey, founded by the Spanish in the early 16th century. Higüey became the region's head and, above all, the great center of the island's Marian devotion thanks to the Virgin of La Altagracia.
According to tradition, an image of the Virgin of La Altagracia arrived in Higüey in the early 16th century and soon awakened intense popular devotion. Over time, the Virgin of La Altagracia became the protector patroness of the Dominican people, and Higüey the country's main pilgrimage center. The whole province bears her name: La Altagracia.
This concentration of religious, administrative and economic life in Higüey explains why the coast that is now Bávaro remained forgotten for five hundred years. The regional economy revolved around cattle raising, timber cutting, salt and coconut palms; the beaches, so coveted today, then had no economic value and were barely a wild landscape frequented by a few fishermen. No one imagined that this forgotten coast would become, within a few decades of the 20th century, one of the most successful tourist destinations on the planet.
The transformation of this coast began in the late 1960s, when a group of investors —pioneers such as Theodore Kheel and Frank Rainieri— bet on developing the Punta Cana area for tourism, acquiring large stretches of then almost worthless coast. The beginnings were difficult: roads had to be built, electricity and services brought to an isolated place, and practically everything raised from scratch. But the asset was unbeatable: beaches of extraordinary beauty, turquoise sea and sun almost year-round.
A decisive milestone was the opening, in 1984, of Punta Cana International Airport, one of the first privately managed international airports in the world, with its characteristic palm-roofed terminal. By allowing direct flights from abroad without passing through Santo Domingo, the airport brought the whole area —including Bávaro— closer to the international tourist market and laid the foundations for the boom to come.
From then on, Bávaro beach, adjacent to Punta Cana and of spectacular beauty, began to attract developers' attention. Its stretch of white sand, its coconut palms and its reef-protected sea made it the ideal setting for large hotel complexes. What for centuries had been a forgotten coast was about to become the area with the greatest concentration of hotels in the country.
From the 1990s, and more strongly in the 2000s, Bávaro beach became the epicenter of the Dominican east's tourism boom. Large international and national hotel chains —especially Spanish companies— built along this coast enormous all-inclusive resorts, with hundreds and even thousands of rooms, pools, buffets, shows and water sports. The all-inclusive model facing one of the most beautiful beaches in the Caribbean proved an overwhelming success.
Bávaro thus came to concentrate the greatest hotel capacity in the Dominican Republic and to receive millions of tourists a year, arriving mostly from the United States, Canada, Europe and South America. Around the resorts also grew more 'local' and lively enclaves, such as El Cortecito and Los Corales, with their restaurants, bars and public beach, which gave the destination a life beyond the enclosed complexes.
That dizzying growth turned tourism into one of the main engines of the Dominican economy, with Bávaro as its flagship. But it also brought challenges: pressure on the environment, water and waste management, the social contrast with the villages where much of the workforce lives and, more recently, phenomena such as the arrival of sargassum on the beaches. Today the area continues to evolve, adding more luxurious projects and betting on diversifying its offering. In half a century, Bávaro went from a coast of coconut palms without roads to one of the great capitals of sun-and-beach tourism in the world.
Despite the intense tourist urbanization of the coast, the Dominican east preserves protected natural treasures of enormous value, which are today an essential part of the experience of those visiting Bávaro. The most important is Cotubanamá National Park (long called Del Este National Park), a vast protected area at the country's far southeast that encompasses forests, coasts, mangroves, caves with Taíno rock art and the famous Saona Island.
Saona Island, within the park, is the jewel and the flagship excursion from Bávaro: an island of unspoiled beaches, coconut palms and turquoise waters, home to seabirds, turtles and manatees, and the setting for the famous 'natural pool'. Its national-park status has allowed much of its original beauty to be preserved, though mass tourism poses management challenges that the authorities try to balance.
The park also protects an important archaeological heritage: numerous caves preserve hundreds of Taíno pictographs and petroglyphs, one of the most significant sets of rock art in the Caribbean, reminding us that long before the resorts this land belonged to the Taíno. The conservation of Cotubanamá, its mangroves, its reefs and its marine fauna is key not only for the environment, but also for the very future of the region's tourism, which increasingly values these natural spaces over the exclusive beach-and-resort model.