Before the Europeans arrived, the island its inhabitants called Quisqueya, Ayití or Bohío was densely populated by the Taíno people, a branch of the Arawak who had come in waves from northern South America over the preceding centuries. They were farmers of cassava —from which they made casabe— and of maize, fishermen and skilled navigators who traveled by canoe all over the Caribbean. Their society was organized into villages of bohíos around ceremonial plazas, and from their language survive words that Spanish carried to the whole world: canoe, hammock, hurricane, barbecue, tobacco, maize, iguana and cacique.
When the Spanish arrived in 1492, the island was politically divided into five great chiefdoms. In the northwest was Marién, ruled by Guacanagarix; in the northeast, Maguá, of the cacique Guarionex, with its seat near present-day Santo Cerro; in the mountainous center, Maguana, the most powerful, ruled by the fearsome Caonabo, husband of the cacica Anacaona; in the southwest, the vast Jaragua of Bohechío; and in the southeast, Higüey, ruled by Cayacoa. Each chiefdom was in turn subdivided into dozens of nitainatos governed by lesser caciques or nitaínos.
The conquest was swift and devastating. Christopher Columbus landed on the island on December 5, 1492 during his first voyage and named it La Española. With the remains of the caravel Santa María, run aground on Christmas Eve 1492, he ordered the building of the fort of La Navidad, the first European settlement in the Americas, which the Taíno destroyed before his return. Very soon forced labor in the gold mines, hunger, violence and above all the diseases brought from Europe caused a brutal demographic collapse: within a few decades the Taíno population, which had numbered in the hundreds of thousands, was all but wiped out. Resistance found its great hero in the cacique Enriquillo, who rebelled in the Sierra de Bahoruco between 1519 and 1533 and won a peace treaty from the Crown, a feat that the friar Bartolomé de las Casas immortalized in his denunciation of the destruction of the Indies.
In 1496, the Adelantado Bartolomé Colón —brother of the admiral— founded on the eastern bank of the Ozama river the town of Nueva Isabela, the first stable nucleus of the colonization of the south of the island. A hurricane destroyed it in 1502, and governor Nicolás de Ovando refounded it on the opposite bank under the name of Santo Domingo, laying out for the first time in the Americas a city with a grid of straight streets that would become the urban model for the whole continent. It was the first permanent European city in the New World and, during the opening decades of the 16th century, the capital and the platform from which Spain organized the conquest: from here Diego Velázquez set out for Cuba, and from there Hernán Cortés for Mexico.
Santo Domingo thus piled up an incomparable list of American 'firsts'. The cathedral of Santa María la Menor, begun in 1512 and completed around 1541, was the first on the continent and, raised to metropolitan rank by Pope Paul III in 1546, is the Primate Cathedral of the Americas. The University of Santo Tomás de Aquino, established by papal bull in 1538 —today the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo—, is the oldest in the hemisphere. To these were added the first hospital, the first stone military fortress (the Ozama Fortress, with its Tower of Homage) and the Alcázar de Colón, the viceregal palace of Diego Colón, son of the discoverer, built around 1510 facing the Plaza de España.
The splendor did not last long. When the rich silver deposits of Mexico and Peru were discovered, La Española lost strategic importance: the gold ran out, the population emigrated to the mainland and the economy turned to sugar and cattle. The island was left an impoverished and depopulated colony, exposed to attacks by corsairs and pirates —the Englishman Francis Drake sacked and occupied Santo Domingo in 1586—. That colonial monumental ensemble, the Colonial Zone, was declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 1990.
The colonial emptiness of the 17th century had lasting consequences. To fight the smuggling that flourished on the unguarded coasts, the Crown ordered in 1605 and 1606 the so-called 'Devastaciones de Osorio': governor Antonio de Osorio forcibly depopulated the north and west of the island, burning entire towns and moving their inhabitants near Santo Domingo. The measure, far from curbing contraband, left half the territory empty, and it was gradually occupied by buccaneers and French settlers who had first established themselves on the island of Tortuga.
In 1697, by the Treaty of Ryswick, Spain formally recognized French possession of the western third of the island: the colony of Saint-Domingue, the future Haiti, was born. Through the 18th century, Saint-Domingue became the richest colony in the world, a gigantic complex of sugar, coffee and indigo plantations sustained by the labor of hundreds of thousands of African slaves brought over in atrocious conditions. The Spanish side, by contrast, remained poor and pastoral, with a mixed-race population among whom slavery, though present, was less massive.
The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), the largest and the only successful slave rebellion in history, transformed the map of the Caribbean. In 1795, by the Treaty of Basel, Spain ceded its part of the island to France as well; general Toussaint Louverture occupied the Spanish side in 1801. After a brief return to Spanish rule —the 'Reconquista' of Juan Sánchez Ramírez, sealed by the victory of Palo Hincado in 1808, and the later 'España Boba'— and a short-lived independence proclaimed in 1821 by José Núñez de Cáceres, on February 9, 1822 the Haitian president Jean-Pierre Boyer entered Santo Domingo and unified the whole island under Haiti.
The Haitian occupation of the former Spanish side lasted twenty-two years, between 1822 and 1844, and left a deep and contradictory mark on the formation of Dominican nationhood. Its first and most far-reaching measure was the definitive abolition of slavery: Boyer freed more than ten thousand slaves, and for that reason, at first, a good part of the population accepted the unification passively. Legal equality and the end of bondage were real advances that no later government reversed.
The regime, however, soon became unpopular. The white, Hispanic elite experienced it as foreign domination; the taxes raised to pay the enormous indemnity that France had demanded from Haiti in exchange for recognizing its independence fell on the population; the University was closed, land was redistributed and militarized, and French was imposed in the administration, along with compulsory military service. The difference of language, religion and culture between the Hispanic east and the French-speaking west fed a nascent Dominican national feeling.
In that climate of discontent the independence conspiracy took shape. In 1838, a young idealist educated in Europe, Juan Pablo Duarte, founded in Santo Domingo the secret society La Trinitaria, whose members organized themselves in cells of three in order to conspire for independence without being discovered by the Haitian authorities. Alongside Duarte, Ramón Matías Mella and Francisco del Rosario Sánchez completed the trio of founders that history consecrated as the Fathers of the Nation, joined by the decisive work of patriots such as María Trinidad Sánchez, who made some of the first flags.
On the night of February 27, 1844, the Trinitarian conspiracy went into action. At the Puerta de la Misericordia in Santo Domingo, Ramón Matías Mella fired the famous blunderbuss shot that gave the signal for the uprising. Shortly afterwards, at the Puerta del Conde, Francisco del Rosario Sánchez raised the Dominican flag for the first time —blue and red quarters separated by a white cross— and the Constitutive Act of the new State was read out and sworn. So was born, by separation from Haiti, the Dominican Republic, the only case in the Americas of a country that becomes independent not from a European power but from another American nation.
The newly won independence had to be defended at once by force of arms. Haitian troops counterattacked, and on March 19, 1844, barely weeks after the proclamation, the Dominican army under the command of Pedro Santana defeated a far more numerous Haitian force at the battle of Azua, the first great military victory, which secured the young Republic. It was followed by years of defensive wars against repeated invasions from the west of the island, which consolidated the border but also militarized political life.
The Trinitarian ideal itself came out of that militarization the loser. The caudillo Pedro Santana, backed by the power of arms, pushed aside and banished the founders: Duarte was sent into exile and died poor in Venezuela in 1876, without seeing his work recognized in his lifetime. Sánchez was executed by firing squad in 1861 while trying to stop the annexation to Spain. So began a long cycle of caudillo rule, civil wars and annexationism between the factions of Santana and of Buenaventura Báez that would mark the rest of the turbulent Dominican 19th century.
Fear of a new Haitian invasion, the chronic bankruptcy of the State and the ambitions of the caudillos led to an episode unheard of in the history of the Americas. On March 18, 1861, president Pedro Santana voluntarily handed the country back to Spain, which made it a colony again seventeen years after having lost it. The move provoked deep popular rejection, aggravated by the arrogance of the new authorities, the discrimination against Dominicans in favor of peninsular Spaniards and the fear that slavery might be reintroduced.
On August 16, 1863, a group of patriots headed by Santiago Rodríguez crossed over from Haiti and raised the Dominican flag on the hill of Capotillo, near Dajabón: it was the 'Grito de Capotillo', the beginning of the War of Restoration. Under the leadership of general Gregorio Luperón —who had refused to sign the annexationist manifesto— and of commanders such as Gaspar Polanco and Benito Monción, the restorers waged a stubborn guerrilla war that wore down the Spanish army, decimated as well by yellow fever and other tropical diseases.
The human and economic cost of sustaining that war for a territory that in truth brought it no profit led Spain to give up. On March 3, 1865, Queen Isabel II signed the annulment of the annexation, and the Spanish troops withdrew. The second independence was consolidated, and August 16 has been celebrated ever since as Restoration Day. But the following decades were ones of extreme instability, culminating in the long and contradictory dictatorship of general Ulises Heureaux ('Lilís'), who ruled with an iron hand until he was gunned down in Moca in 1899, leaving the country sunk in debt.
In the last decades of the 19th century, the sugar industry surged back with enormous force in the southeast of the country. Cuban, American and Puerto Rican businessmen set up large modern mills in San Pedro de Macorís, La Romana and Barahona, which drew thousands of workers: cane cutters from Haiti and, above all, immigrants from the English and Dutch Antilles known as 'cocolos', whose culture, dances and baseball would transform those regions forever. San Pedro de Macorís became the 'Sultana del Este', one of the richest and most cosmopolitan cities in the Caribbean.
Sugar prosperity did not bring political stability. The foreign debt inherited from Lilís and the permanent instability gave the United States its pretext to intervene. After years of customs control, in 1916 the U.S. marines militarily occupied the country, imposing a military government that lasted until 1924. The occupation built roads, schools and hospitals, but it also harshly repressed the resistance of the peasant 'gavilleros' of the east and dissolved Congress.
The most lasting consequence of that occupation was the creation of a professional military force, the National Guard, trained by the Americans. In its ranks a young officer from San Cristóbal named Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina made a rapid career. When the marines withdrew in 1924, they left behind a unified and powerful army that would very soon be the instrument for the rise of one of the most iron-fisted dictators in Latin American history.
In 1930, taking advantage of a revolt and of the army's backing, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo came to power through fraudulent elections and installed one of the longest, most personalist and most brutal dictatorships in Latin America. For thirty-one years, the 'Era de Trujillo' had absolute control over every aspect of national life: the economy —the dictator and his family monopolized much of the country's wealth—, politics, the press and even the private lives of citizens, in a personality cult that went so far as to rename the capital 'Ciudad Trujillo' between 1936 and 1961 and Pico Duarte as 'Pico Trujillo'.
The regime rested on terror. Thousands of opponents were jailed, tortured and murdered by the feared Intelligence Service. The most atrocious episode was the Parsley Massacre of October 1937, when Trujillo ordered the army to exterminate the Haitian population of the border zone: within a few days thousands of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent were murdered, with estimates ranging between twelve thousand and twenty thousand victims, in an episode of ethnic violence and state xenophobia.
The dictatorship began to crack from within and from without. The murder of the three Mirabal sisters —Patria, Minerva and María Teresa, opposition figures known as 'the Butterflies'— on November 25, 1960 shook the country and isolated the regime internationally. Six months later, on May 30, 1961, Trujillo was ambushed and killed on the road from Ciudad Trujillo to San Cristóbal by a group of conspirators. His death opened up, after a brief attempt by his heirs to keep the regime going, the difficult road to democracy.
After Trujillo's fall, in 1962 the country held its first free elections in almost four decades, which gave the presidency to the writer and politician Juan Bosch, of the Dominican Revolutionary Party. In 1963 Bosch promulgated an advanced Constitution that guaranteed broad liberties and social, agrarian and labor rights, which earned him the hostility of the oligarchy, the conservative Church and the military. In September 1963, barely seven months after taking office, he was overthrown by a military coup.
On April 24, 1965 a constitutionalist uprising broke out in Santo Domingo, led by colonel Francisco Alberto Caamaño, demanding the return of Bosch and of the 1963 Constitution. The revolt turned into a civil war between the 'constitutionalists' and the 'loyalist' military sectors. Four days later, claiming there was a risk of 'a second Cuba' at the height of the Cold War, U.S. president Lyndon Johnson ordered the landing of more than twenty thousand soldiers in operation 'Power Pack', joined by an Inter-American Peace Force of the OAS.
The intervention put down the revolution and oversaw a negotiated way out. In 1966 elections were held under occupation, won by Joaquín Balaguer, a former trusted man of Trujillo, against Juan Bosch. Balaguer thus opened a stage of authoritarian government and developmentalism, with abundant public works but also with political repression, which would last through his 'twelve years' (1966-1978) and, with interruptions, much of the following decades.
Since 1978, when Balaguer accepted his electoral defeat and handed power to Antonio Guzmán's PRD, the Dominican Republic has lived in democracy, with peaceful alternation between the major parties: the PRD, Balaguer's Reformist Party and, later, the Dominican Liberation Party founded by Juan Bosch. Under the presidency of Leonel Fernández (1996-2000 and 2004-2012), the country went through a notable modernization, strong macroeconomic growth and the expansion of infrastructure such as the Santo Domingo metro, though it also dragged along financial crises and persistent inequalities.
The great engine of the transformation was tourism. From the pioneering Playa Dorada in Puerto Plata in the seventies and, above all, from the takeoff of Punta Cana, the Dominican Republic became the most visited destination in the Caribbean, with millions of tourists a year drawn by its white-sand beaches, its all-inclusive resorts and a hotel infrastructure without rival in the region. To that are added the remittances of a diaspora of more than two million Dominicans —above all in the United States and Spain—, the industrial free zones, gold and ferronickel mining, and an agriculture that exports cocoa, tobacco, rum and bananas.
That economic drive coexists with a vibrant cultural identity that the country has projected to the world. Merengue, declared Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by Unesco in 2016, and bachata, recognized in 2019, are global ambassadors of Dominican music. Baseball, inherited from the sugar culture, makes the island one of the great nurseries of the Major Leagues. And its cooking, its carnivals and its Colonial Zone complete the portrait of a nation that, five centuries after being the head of the conquest, is today the largest economy and one of the most recognizable faces of the Caribbean.
The 32 histories, one after another. Use the buttons above to jump to the one you want.
In Taíno times the territory of Azua was part of a nitainato of the Maguana chiefdom, one of the five great lordships of the island of Quisqueya. When Columbus took shelter in the bay of Ocoa during one of his voyages, he met the resistance of the local cacique, named Cuyocagua, lord of these lands.
The town of Azua de Compostela was founded in 1504 by the conquistador Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, acting with powers delegated by governor Nicolás de Ovando. «Azua» is the Taíno name of the region, while «Compostela» —field of stars— was added by the settler Pedro Gallego in homage to Santiago de Compostela, in Galicia.
Colonial Azua was a prosperous town, with early sugar mills and famous residents such as Hernán Cortés, who lived there before setting out for the conquest of Mexico. Earthquakes and attacks, however, forced it to move site: old Azua, today known as Pueblo Viejo, was abandoned after the devastating earthquake of 1751, and the city was rebuilt on its present location.
Down the centuries, Azua kept its role as the head town of the south, an obligatory stop between the capital and the provinces of the southwest and the border with Haiti.
On March 19, 1844, barely weeks after the proclamation of independence, Azua was the scene of the Battle of March 19, one of the first and most important victories of the newborn Dominican army over the Haitian forces that were trying to reverse the separation.
That triumph, in which general Pedro Santana distinguished himself, strengthened the independence movement and confirmed Azua as a symbol of resistance and determination. The date was engraved in the country's history, and the province commemorates it with pride as one of the great milestones of the founding of the Republic.
Today Azua is one of the great farming larders of the southwest. Thanks to the irrigation systems that draw on the waters of the Yaque del Sur river and the Sabana Yegua reservoir, its plains produce plantains, bananas, industrial tomatoes, vegetables and, most especially, melons and other fruits that are exported.
High-altitude coffee and cattle raising round out a thriving rural economy. With its colonial history, its part in the fight for independence and its irrigated farmland, Azua de Compostela remains the key city of the Dominican south.
The Sabana Yegua reservoir, on the Yaque del Sur river, is the key to irrigation in Azua: thanks to it, the dry southern plains have been turned into productive fields that make the province one of the country's largest exporters of melons and plantains.
Azua is a land of national heroes and of culture. Besides having hosted famous conquistadors, it was the birthplace or home of notable figures of Dominican history, and it keeps a strong civic tradition tied to its founding role in independence.
Its patron-saint festivals, its music and its cooking based on the fruits of the plain and the southern sea are part of its identity. With Pueblo Viejo as a witness to the old town, its Caribbean beaches, its irrigation systems and its standing as the gateway to the southwest, Azua de Compostela combines more than five centuries of history with the vitality of one of the country's great farming larders.
The name of Bahoruco calls up the greatest feat of indigenous resistance on La Española. In 1519, the Taíno noble Enriquillo, educated by the friars and cacique of the region, rebelled against the abuses of the Spanish encomenderos and took refuge in the rugged Sierra de Bahoruco. From its mountains and from places such as the Hoyo de Pelempito he waged a guerrilla war that lasted fourteen years.
Neither the army nor the settlers managed to defeat him, and in 1533 the Crown was forced to sign a peace recognizing his freedom and that of his followers. Enriquillo thus became a lasting symbol of dignity and resistance, immortalized by the novel of the same name by Manuel de Jesús Galván.
In pre-Hispanic times the area of Neiba, the provincial capital, was a nitainato subject to the Jaragua chiefdom. Through the colonial period and the 19th century it was a border and cattle-raising region, the scene of repeated fighting between Dominicans and Haitians.
The province of Bahoruco was created in 1943; before that date its territory was part of the province of Barahona. Lying between Lake Enriquillo to the north and the Sierra de Bahoruco to the south, it is one of the provinces of the deep Dominican southwest.
Neiba stands some 180 kilometers west of Santo Domingo, very close to the shore of Lake Enriquillo, the largest lake in the Antilles, which places it in an exceptional geographical setting between the salt water of the lake, the aridity of the valley and the peaks of the mountains.
Neiba is famous throughout the Dominican Republic for its vineyards, the only ones in the country on a commercial scale. Growing vines on the island goes back to Columbus's own day —Columbus himself asked the Spanish monarchs for vine shoots—, but it was in the arid, sunny valley of Neiba, with its dry climate and its limestone soils, that it took root as a tradition.
Its grapes yield wines, juices and the celebrated table grape. Every year the city holds its Grape Festival, and its identity was fixed in the nickname of «the city of history, the grape, wine, coffee and literature», which sums up its singular cultural and agricultural profile.
Besides the vine, the economy of Bahoruco rests on the coffee of the heights of the Sierra de Bahoruco, on irrigated farming in the valley and on salt production, both from the sea and from the salt flats linked to the surroundings of Lake Enriquillo.
Its natural heritage is remarkable: the Sierra de Bahoruco, with its forests and its endemic wildlife, and the closeness of Lake Enriquillo and of the Jaragua-Bahoruco-Enriquillo Biosphere Reserve make the province a territory of great ecological value, between the desert, the mountains and the salt lake.
Today Bahoruco is one of the most singular provinces of the southwest, where desert, mountains and the great salt lake live side by side. Its economy combines the winegrowing of Neiba, irrigated farming, high-altitude coffee and salt production, in a setting of great ecological value.
The legacy of Enriquillo, a national symbol of indigenous resistance, and the fame of the city of the grape and of wine give the province an unmistakable identity. Among vineyards, salt flats and the imposing Sierra de Bahoruco, this land of the deep southwest offers one of the most original and least explored corners in all of Dominican geography.
Barahona has a singular origin: it was officially founded in 1802 by the Haitian general Toussaint Louverture, at a time when the whole island was under French rule after the cession of the Spanish side. As early as 1795 cane cutters from the neighboring districts had settled in the town, making the most of the fertile coastal plain of the southwest.
The town thus arose as a sugar and port enclave in a region that in Taíno times had belonged to the domains of the Jaragua chiefdom, ruled by Bohechío and his sister Anacaona.
The 19th century confirmed the strategic importance of Barahona. In 1845 a military post was set up, in 1859 it became a Comandancia de Armas, in 1881 a Maritime District and finally, in November 1907, a province. In 1913 it even served for a time as the seat of the Executive Branch amid the political upheavals of the day.
That gradual administrative promotion reflected the growing weight of the city as the head town of the deep south and as a control point for the vast, thinly populated border region of the Dominican southwest.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the setting up of sugar mills gave Barahona a strong economic push, making cane the engine of local life. To that crop was added the coffee of the highlands of the Sierra de Bahoruco, of excellent quality.
But the province's great treasure is larimar, a rare sky-blue variety of pectolite found nowhere else in the world but in the mountains of Barahona. Mined at Los Chupaderos, larimar has become a symbol of the south and one of the most prized gemstones in the Dominican Republic.
Much of the province, in its western portion, is taken up by the Sierra de Bahoruco, an imposing mountain range of great biodiversity protected as a national park. Its slopes, its cloud forests and its endemic species make the area a natural sanctuary of the first order.
The coast, for its part, alternates pebble beaches where the Caribbean Sea pounds hard with freshwater bathing spots fed by mountain rivers. Nearby lies the famous Bahía de las Águilas, considered the most beautiful unspoiled beach in the country. Untamed nature and spectacular landscapes are what define Barahona.
Today the economy of Barahona combines sugar cane, plantains, coffee, larimar mining and a nature tourism in full growth, resting on the coastal road towards Pedernales and on the national parks of the southwest. It is also the birthplace of cultural figures, such as the poet Delia Weber or the composer and southern musician of the region.
Far from the great tourist hubs, Barahona offers an authentic, mountainous south, of coffee, larimar and rough sea, which many consider the most beautiful and least explored region of the Dominican Republic.
Dajabón sits on the river of the same name, which forms part of the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti. That watercourse, known today as the Massacre River, owes its grim name to episodes of border violence going back to colonial times, when it was the scene of clashes between Spanish settlers and French buccaneers.
Set in the far northwest of the country, across from the Haitian city of Ouanaminthe, Dajabón has always been borderland, marked by contact —commercial and conflictive— between the two nations that share the island.
The northwestern region played a prominent part in the War of the Restoration (1863-1865). Very close to Dajabón, on the hill of Capotillo, came the Grito that began the fight against annexation to Spain, and the area served as a base of operations for the restorationist patriots who moved on both sides of the border.
For decades Dajabón was administratively part of Monte Cristi. It was made a province in the 20th century and established itself as the head of the border stretch known as the Línea Noroeste, with an economy of farming, cattle raising and border trade.
In October 1937 the border region was the scene of one of the darkest episodes in Dominican history: the Parsley Massacre. Between October 2 and 8, on the orders of dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, Dominican troops and police carried out a mass killing of Haitians and people of Haitian descent settled along the border.
The story goes that suspects were made to pronounce the Spanish word 'perejil' (parsley): those who could not articulate the r correctly were identified as Haitians and killed. The victims, estimated at between nine thousand and twenty thousand depending on the source, included women, children and the elderly, and many of their bodies were thrown into the river, which from then on bore the name Massacre River all the more heavily.
Today Dajabón is famous for its binational market, one of the biggest points of trade between the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Twice a week, thousands of Haitian traders cross the bridge over the Massacre River to buy and sell clothes, food, footwear and all kinds of goods in a bustling market that moves millions of pesos.
This border trade, the economic engine of the province, lives alongside the painful memory of 1937 and the periodic tensions between the two countries, making Dajabón a symbol of the complex and at the same time intense Dominican-Haitian relationship.
Today Dajabón is the great northwestern gateway from the Dominican Republic into Haiti, a border province whose life revolves around binational trade, agriculture, the rice of the Línea Noroeste and cattle raising.
Its history condenses the light and shadow of the border: the restorationist heroism of Capotillo, in its neighborhood, and the tragedy of the Parsley Massacre, whose memory is kept alive as a warning. Between the bustle of the market over the Massacre River, the rice fields and the constant relationship —commercial and human— with the Haitian people, Dajabón embodies like few others the complexity of the shared island.
The Distrito Nacional is the territory occupied by the city of Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic. It was founded in 1496 by Bartolomé Colón as Nueva Isabela, on the eastern bank of the Ozama River, and refounded in 1502 by governor Nicolás de Ovando on the western bank after a devastating hurricane. It is the oldest European city on the American continent to have been continuously inhabited, and its grid of straight streets was the first in the New World and the model for every colonial city that came after.
During the first decades of the 16th century, Santo Domingo was the effective capital of the Indies and the platform from which Spain organized the conquest of much of the Americas. The expeditions that colonized Cuba sailed from its docks, and it was from there that Hernán Cortés set out for Mexico. It was, literally, the head of the enterprise of conquering the continent.
In Santo Domingo's historic core, the Colonial Zone, the great 'firsts' of the Americas were raised. The Cathedral of Santa María la Menor, built between 1512 and 1541, is the oldest on the continent; raised to metropolitan rank by Pope Paul III in 1546, it holds the title of Primate Cathedral of the Americas. The University of Santo Tomás de Aquino, today the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo, was established by papal bull in 1538 and is the oldest in the hemisphere.
To these are added the first hospital in the Americas (San Nicolás de Bari), the first stone military fortress —the Fortaleza Ozama, with its Torre del Homenaje— and the Alcázar de Colón, a palace built around 1510 for Diego Colón, son of the discoverer and first viceroy of the New World. This exceptional monumental ensemble was declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 1990, and its walls and cobbled streets are still the historic heart of the nation.
Santo Domingo was the central stage for the great milestones of Dominican history. At its Puerta del Conde, inside Parque Independencia, Francisco del Rosario Sánchez raised the flag for the first time and the Republic was proclaimed on February 27, 1844; there, in the Altar de la Patria, rest today the remains of the three Founding Fathers: Duarte, Sánchez and Mella. The city was also sacked by the corsair Francis Drake in 1586 and occupied by foreign powers at different moments in its history.
Under the dictatorship, between 1936 and 1961, the capital bore the name 'Ciudad Trujillo', which it lost after the regime fell. In 2001 the old demarcation was reorganized: the Distrito Nacional was reduced to the urban core of the capital, while the metropolitan belt went on to form the new province of Santo Domingo. The Distrito Nacional is today an autonomous demarcation and the political, economic, cultural and financial heart of the country.
With its metropolitan area —Greater Santo Domingo—, the capital is one of the most populous cities in the Antilles, with close to three million inhabitants. Its Malecón, the long George Washington avenue facing the Caribbean Sea, is the great stage of life in the capital and of festivities such as Carnival and the Merengue Festival, and it ends at an obelisk raised in the Trujillo era.
The city combines the colonial heritage of its cobbled streets with modern towers, museums such as those of the Plaza de la Cultura and the monumental Faro a Colón, an imposing cross-shaped mausoleum inaugurated in 1992 for the Quincentenary, where what are held to be the discoverer's remains are kept. Santo Domingo is also the main gateway for tourism and the engine of the economy that made the Dominican Republic the fastest-growing in the Caribbean.
In pre-Columbian times the area now covered by the province was part of the chiefdom of Maguá, one of the great Taíno lordships of the island. The region was inhabited by the Ciguayo or Macorix people, one of the few groups that put up serious resistance to the arrival of the Spanish after 1492.
The 'Macorís' in the capital's name comes from those inhabitants. The province lies on the fertile plain of the lower Yuna River, in the Cibao depression, one of the most productive farming areas in the whole country.
The capital, San Francisco de Macorís, began as a settlement that grew around the monastery of Santa Ana, and its formal founding is dated September 20, 1778. Its name combines that of Saint Francis, patron of the Franciscan Order, with the old place name Macorix.
The city is known as 'the Land of Cacao': it was the cacao market, driven by European investment at the beginning of the 18th century, that allowed the community to prosper and become one of the main cities of the eastern Cibao, an important commercial, agricultural, industrial and university center in the northeast of the country.
The province is named after Juan Pablo Duarte, founder of the Republic and the foremost Dominican patriot, the mind behind La Trinitaria and the independence of 1844. It was not always called that, though: on July 26, 1926, the Legislative Chamber changed its old name of Pacificador province to Duarte province, in honor of the father of the nation.
So this thriving Cibao province joins the memory of the patriot who dreamed the nation with the vitality of one of the most economically active regions of the Dominican northeast.
Duarte province is one of the Dominican Republic's great rice granaries, thanks to the flood-prone lands of the Yuna valley, and also an important producer of quality cacao, much of it organic and destined for export. Agriculture —rice, cacao, coffee, plantain, coconut— takes up most of its territory.
Its wetlands and lagoons, tied to the Yuna River and to the neighboring Bay of Samaná, are partly protected within the national parks of Manglares del Bajo Yuna and Los Haitises, and are home to rich birdlife. Prosperous farming and wetland nature define this Cibao province.
San Francisco de Macorís is a university and commercial city with a strong character, the birthplace of notable intellectuals, athletes and musicians, and the seat of important higher-education institutions in the northeast. Its urban life, dynamic and prosperous, has made it one of the country's main cities.
The province keeps religious and festive traditions with Cibao roots, and its cooking, tied to cacao and the fruits of the land, is part of its appeal. Between the rice fields of the Yuna, the organic cacao plantations and the memory of the patriot Juan Pablo Duarte who gives it its name, this province sums up the agricultural and cultural drive of the eastern Cibao.
Santa Cruz del Seibo was founded around 1502 by the conquistador Juan de Esquivel, during the government of Fray Nicolás de Ovando, and was granted the title of villa on December 7, 1508. It is therefore one of the oldest settlements on the American continent.
Its name combines the Spanish custom of planting the Cross of Christ as protection with the indigenous place name: 'Seibo' comes from Seebo, a Taíno sub-chief of the region subject to the authority of Cayacoa, cacique of Higüey. The town's roots thus lie both in the Spanish conquest and in the indigenous world of the island's east.
El Seibo is one of the Dominican Republic's original provinces: it was created by the Constitution of November 6, 1844, though it already existed as a territorial demarcation in colonial times. For centuries it covered much of the east of the country, from which provinces such as La Romana, La Altagracia and Hato Mayor were later carved out.
The church of Santa Cruz del Seibo, colonial in origin, is one of the oldest in the country, and for a time it held the remains of General Pedro Santana, a native of this region and the first president of the Dominican Republic.
El Seibo was a land of large cattle ranches from colonial times, and that livestock vocation shaped men on horseback, among them General Pedro Santana (1801-1864), the caudillo of the east who served three times as president of the First Republic and led the controversial annexation to Spain.
Cattle raising is still the most important economic activity of the municipality and of much of the province, complemented by the growing of sugarcane, especially at the neighboring sugar mill of the region.
General Pedro Santana, lord of the ranches of El Seibo, became the dominant military figure of the First Republic: a hero of the battles against Haiti and, at the same time, the man who promoted the annexation to Spain in 1861, in one of the most controversial decisions in the nation's history.
El Seibo preserves one of the most colorful festive traditions in the country: the Fiesta de los Toros, held in honor of the Holy Cross, in which religious devotion mixes with bull runs and cattle-raising events of deep popular roots. The province is also known as the 'cradle of independence' for the part its men played in the country's patriotic feats.
Another local symbol is mabí, a fermented drink made from the bark of the bejuco de indio vine, a traditional refreshment that El Seibo takes pride in as the 'land of mabí'. Colonial history, cattle culture and living traditions define this old town of the east.
Today El Seibo is an essentially rural province, with a cattle and sugarcane economy, one that has gradually given up territory to the more touristy provinces of the east but keeps intact its standing as one of the oldest towns in the country and one of the richest in historical pedigree.
Its old town center, with the colonial church of Santa Cruz, its bullfighting and devotional tradition, and the pride of being the birthplace of figures such as Pedro Santana, make this province a corner loaded with history. Cattle, sugarcane, mabí and colonial memory come together in a land that was among the first to be settled in the whole American continent.
Elías Piña lies in the west of the country, on the border with Haiti, in a region dominated by the Cordillera Central to the north and the Sierra de Neiba to the south, between which open valleys watered by the Artibonito River and its tributaries. Its capital, Comendador, takes its name from the comendador of Lares, Governor Nicolás de Ovando.
The municipality of Comendador took shape at the beginning of the nineteenth century —originally known as the hato, or cattle estate, of El Duan— and gained importance from 1868 onward. Like the whole border zone, its history was marked by contact and conflict with neighboring Haiti, and by the schemes to settle the frontier.
The province owes its name to Colonel Elías Piña, a native of La Margarita, a settlement in Comendador. A soldier of the Independence, he fought in the turbulent border zone and died in 1845 attacking a fortified Haitian position near Bánica, giving his life for the young Republic.
In his honor, the province —created in 1942 during the Trujillo Era under the name of San Rafael, later Estrelleta— definitively adopted on December 29, 1972 the name of Elías Piña, one of the many heroes of the frontier wars that forged the nation.
The economy of Elías Piña is fundamentally agricultural and mountainous. In the southern part, in the Sierra de Neiba, coffee, potatoes and beans are grown, highland crops that take advantage of the cool climate of the summits. In the valleys and plains corn, beans and other subsistence products are also cultivated.
It is one of the provinces with the highest levels of poverty in the country, with a rural economy, barely industrialized and heavily dependent on family farming and on trade with the other side of the border.
The Artibonito River, the longest on the whole island of Hispaniola, rises in the Cordillera Central and crosses the province before running on into Haiti, linking together the farming valleys of this mountainous border region.
One of the liveliest features of Elías Piña is its intense border trade. Comendador is the site of one of the great binational markets of the island: several times a week, Haitian traders cross at the official crossing toward Belladère to exchange goods with Dominicans, in a bustling market that is the main economic engine of the province.
This flow of trade, though marked by periodic tensions between the two countries, organizes life in this remote mountain province and ties it into the complex economy of the Dominican-Haitian border.
The province holds a remarkable historic heritage in the village of Bánica, one of the oldest settlements on the border, founded in the sixteenth century, with its colonial church and the nearby San Francisco cave, a place of pilgrimage during Holy Week.
The border culture of Elías Piña, a permanent crossing between the Dominican and the Haitian, shows in its music, its food and its markets. Despite being one of the poorest and most remote provinces of the country, it treasures mountain landscapes of great beauty in the Sierra de Neiba and the Cordillera Central, and a tough identity forged by centuries of life on the border line.
When the island was discovered in 1492, the region of present-day Espaillat was inhabited by Indigenous people holding the rank of nitaínos —a class of co-rulers— and formed part of the chiefdom of Maguá, in the fertile Cibao valley. The abundance of water and the richness of its soils made it farming country from early on.
Moca, its capital, grew as a farming town in the interior of the eastern Cibao. Its name and its character were tied forever to the production of coffee and cacao and to a strong rural and Catholic identity that still sets it apart today.
Reaching the sea along the Atlantic coast in its municipality of Gaspar Hernández, the province combines the coffee-growing interior with a coastal strip, which gives it a remarkable variety of landscapes, from the humid Cibao valley to the beaches of the north.
In 1885, by Law 2338 of May 29, under the government of Alejandro Woss y Gil, Moca was raised to a province with the name of Espaillat, in memory of Ulises Francisco Espaillat, civilist leader and President of the Republic in 1876, admired for his honesty and his democratic calling.
The name thus honors one of the great figures of nineteenth-century Dominican liberal thought, in a province that would always take pride in its civic tradition and its independence of judgment.
Moca holds a central place in Dominican political history: it was there that, on July 26, 1899, the dictator Ulises Heureaux, nicknamed Lilís, was gunned down. He had been one of the most powerful and ruthless men in the country during the last two decades of the nineteenth century.
With the nation on the brink of bankruptcy, a group of young men from the Cibao —among them Horacio Vásquez, Ramón Cáceres and Jacobito de Lara— shot him dead in broad daylight in the streets of Moca, putting an end to his regime. The assassination opened a new and turbulent chapter in Dominican political life and cemented the city's rebel reputation.
The economy of Espaillat rests on the agriculture of the Cibao: plantain, cacao, coffee and cassava are its main crops, and the province is one of the country's great coffee- and cacao-growing centers. As early as 1897 a commercial railway linked Sánchez with Moca and Puerto Plata, carrying the produce of the Cibao to the sea.
Moca preserves a notable heritage, headed by the church of the Sagrado Corazón de Jesús, with its famous stained glass, and a strong religious and musical tradition. Coffee, cacao and a proud civic identity define this province in the heart of the Cibao.
Today Espaillat is one of the most productive provinces of the Cibao. To its coffee and cacao tradition are added a thriving poultry industry —it is one of the country's leading producers of eggs and chicken—, cattle raising and a growing manufacturing sector.
Moca keeps the air of a hardworking, Catholic city, proud of its civic history and of its part in key episodes of Dominican politics. Its churches, its mountain bathing spots such as those at Salto de Jima, and its Cibao cooking round out the appeal of a province that combines agricultural prosperity with a strong identity of its own.
Before the Spaniards arrived, Indigenous groups lived in the caves and along the coasts of the Los Haitises region. When the conquistadors found here broad savannas ideal for raising cattle, they founded nine hatos, or stock estates, and the largest of them, created in the name of King Charles I of Spain, gave rise to the place name: the Hato Mayor del Rey.
That great cattle estate, founded around 1520 and administered as an entailed estate by Francisco Dávila, was for centuries a center of cattle breeding. In 1746, Antonio Coca y Landeche formally constituted it as a town, consolidating a settlement that lived on livestock and farming.
On October 13, 1848, President Manuel Jimenes proclaimed Hato Mayor del Rey a municipality of the province of El Seibo, on which it depended for more than a century. Its development was always tied to cattle raising and, later, to the sugar industry of the east.
Hato Mayor is one of the youngest provinces in the country: it was created on December 3, 1984, on splitting from El Seibo. Its capital, Hato Mayor del Rey, keeps in its name the memory of that great royal estate of colonial times.
True to its origin, the main activity of the province is farming and stock raising. Hato Mayor is one of the leading cattle areas of the country, for both beef and dairy, and it also produces cacao —much of it organic and destined for export—, citrus and sugarcane.
The Consuelo sugar mill, in its eastern neighborhood, and the cane tradition of the east combine with the cattle pastures and the cacao plantations to make up a solid rural economy, closely bound to the land.
The nearby Consuelo mill, one of the great sugar mills of the Dominican east, shaped the lives of thousands of workers in the area during the twentieth century, drawing in cane cutters and giving form to the bateyes that still dot the province's rural landscape.
The great natural attraction of Hato Mayor is Los Haitises National Park, a maze of limestone mogotes, mangroves, cays and caves stretching toward Samaná Bay. Its caverns preserve Taíno pictographs and petroglyphs, evidence of the Indigenous communities that lived in the area before the conquest.
This unique ecosystem, one of the most spectacular in the Caribbean, has turned the province into an ecotourism destination, with boat trips among the mangroves and birdwatching. Cattle, cacao and nature thus define the profile of Hato Mayor.
Like much of the Dominican east, Hato Mayor keeps alive cultural expressions of Afro-Caribbean root. Its patron saint festivals, its brotherhoods and its palos and atabales drumming speak of the mixing that forged this land of cattle estates and bateyes.
Gagá, a syncretic tradition inherited from the Haitian labor force of the sugar mills, still appears during Holy Week in the cane-growing communities, while Catholic devotions and the rhythms of the east round out a rich and vibrant intangible heritage. Colonial history, cattle, cacao and an intense festive life define the identity of this young province.
The province, in the northeastern Cibao, was known for almost the whole of the twentieth century by the name of Salcedo. Its fertile lands, historically part of the chiefdom of Maguá in Taíno times, became one of the country's great cacao- and coffee-producing areas.
Cacao growing developed above all from the end of the nineteenth century, spurred by the La Vega-Sánchez railway that carried the produce of the Cibao to the port, alongside the coffee crop. Ojo de Agua, a rural community in this province, would be the birthplace of its most famous daughters.
The Mirabal sisters —Patria, Minerva and María Teresa— were born into a well-off family in Ojo de Agua, in what was then the province of Salcedo. Educated and brave, they became a symbol of the opposition to the bloody dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo.
In 1959 they founded the 14th of June Revolutionary Movement, named after a failed armed expedition against the regime. Under the code name «Las Mariposas», they organized resistance cells, handed out pamphlets and hid weapons, keeping alive the hope of a free Dominican Republic.
On November 25, 1960, Patria, Minerva and María Teresa Mirabal were intercepted and murdered by agents of the regime as they returned from visiting their husbands, who were political prisoners. Their bodies were placed in a jeep sent over a ravine to fake an accident.
The crime shocked the country and the world and marked the beginning of the end of the dictatorship, which would fall with the killing of Trujillo barely six months later, in 1961. In memory of that murder, the UN declared November 25 the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, giving universal reach to the legacy of the three sisters.
In 2007, Congress approved changing the name of the province of Salcedo to Hermanas Mirabal, as official recognition of the three women's impact on the nation's history. In the community of Ojo de Agua, the family home turned into the Casa Museo Hermanas Mirabal preserves their personal belongings and keeps their memory alive.
Today the province combines its cacao and coffee tradition with historical tourism tied to the Butterflies, whose example of courage in the face of tyranny has made it a place of civic and feminist pilgrimage inside and outside the Dominican Republic.
Today the province of Hermanas Mirabal is a quiet, green corner of the Cibao, with a farming economy centered on cacao, coffee and other crops, and a cultural life marked by the pride of being the cradle of the Butterflies.
Salcedo, its capital, and the community of Ojo de Agua receive visitors from all over the world drawn by the story of the three sisters and by the Casa Museo that preserves their memory. Among cacao plantations, mountain landscapes and the enduring legacy of Patria, Minerva and María Teresa, the province has become a national and international symbol of the struggle for freedom and for women's rights.
Before the Spanish conquest, the territory of what is now Independencia Province belonged to the chiefdom of Jaragua, ruled by the cacique Bohechío and, later, linked to the figure of Queen Anacaona. It was a region of savannas and mountains around a great salt lake, in the heart of the southwest of the island.
With the colonial partition of Hispaniola, this area was turned into borderland with the French colony, a condition that has marked its history to this day. Jimaní, its capital, is one of the four great official crossings between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, facing the Haitian town of Malpasse.
The dominant geographic feature of the province is Lake Enriquillo, the largest lake in the insular Caribbean and the lowest point in all the Antilles, lying below sea level. Its hypersaline waters, the legacy of an ancient arm of the sea that was left isolated, are home to American crocodiles, iguanas and numerous birds.
Within it lies Cabritos Island, protected as a national park. The lake owes its name to the cacique Enriquillo, a symbol of indigenous resistance, and its setting of aridity, palm trees and mountains makes up one of the most singular landscapes in the country.
The province was created on December 29, 1948, though it came into force on January 1, 1950. In its short administrative history it changed names several times: first it was Jimaní Province, then Nueva Era Province, and it finally took the name of Independencia on May 13, 1949, in a climate of patriotic fervor.
Jimaní, La Descubierta, Duvergé, Mella and Postrer Río are some of its municipalities, small towns that live off irrigated farming, border trade and fishing in the lake.
In the early hours of May 24, 2004, a sudden flood of the Blanco River —called the Soliette River in Haiti— caused one of the greatest natural catastrophes in the country's recent history. After torrential rains on the mountainous border, an avalanche of water and mud swept away entire communities of Jimaní, especially the neighborhood of Las Cuarenta, catching its inhabitants as they slept.
Official Dominican figures spoke of at least 414 dead in Jimaní, to which were added hundreds more in the neighboring Haitian town of Fond-Verrettes; relief organizations estimated that the real number of dead and missing may have exceeded two thousand. The disaster left a deep wound and exposed the fragility of this border region.
Today Independencia remains one of the poorest and most thinly populated provinces in the country, but also one of the richest in nature and in ecotourism potential. Irrigated agriculture —plantains, grapes, vegetables—, fishing in the lake and trade with Haiti sustain its economy.
Lake Enriquillo, Cabritos Island, the freshwater bathing spots of La Descubierta and its condition as a land of frontier and of Taíno memory make this province a destination of extreme nature and strong southern identity.
In pre-Hispanic times the east of the island was the chiefdom of Higüey, one of the five great Taíno domains, ruled by the cacique Cayacoa. It was the last region of the island to be subdued: the Spanish, under Juan de Esquivel, waged here the 'First War of Higüey' in 1503 and the 'Second War' in 1506 to break indigenous resistance, with episodes of great violence recounted by the chroniclers.
After the conquest, the town of Salvaleón de Higüey was founded in the first years of the sixteenth century. From colonial times, the region lived off sugar cane, ginger, cacao and, above all, the vast cattle ranching that characterized the whole eastern end of the island.
Higüey became the great religious center of the country. It is home to the Basilica of Our Lady of Altagracia, the main Marian shrine of the Dominican Republic and the goal of massive pilgrimages every January 21. The province takes its name precisely from that Marian title, La Altagracia, spiritual patroness of the nation, whose venerated image has been preserved since colonial times.
Higüey, its capital, is today a bustling commercial inland city, with the modern concrete Basilica inaugurated in 1971 next to the old church of San Dionisio, very different in character from the beach resort hubs that surround it.
Until the end of the sixties, the eastern tip of the province was a remote coast of coconut groves and reefs, without roads or electricity, known as Punta Borrachón. In 1969, a group of investors, among them the Dominican businessman Frank Rainieri, acquired thousands of hectares of untouched beach and began developing a tourism project, renaming the area Punta Cana. The first hotel, the Punta Cana Club, opened in 1971.
The construction, in 1984, of Punta Cana International Airport —the first fully private international airport in the world, with its distinctive terminal roofed in cana palm thatch— sped up the mass arrival of tourists. That same year, the Barceló brothers began raising hotels in the neighboring area of Bávaro, starting the expansion that would transform the Dominican economy.
Since then, Punta Cana, Bávaro, Cap Cana and Uvero Alto have become the largest concentration of all-inclusive resorts in the Caribbean: dozens of kilometers of white sand, coconut palms and turquoise sea that make the Dominican Republic the most visited country in the region. Every year several million tourists from all over the world arrive in the province, and its airport handles the heaviest international traffic in the country.
That mass tourist development completely transformed the economy and the demographics of the east, drawing workers from every province and turning what had been an empty corner into the great engine of national tourism.
In the south of the province, the old fishing village of Bayahíbe is today the gateway to the richest waters of the east. Off the coast, separated by the Catuano channel, stretches Saona Island, the largest in the country, with white sand beaches, palm groves and mangroves. It forms part of Cotubanamá National Park —formerly Parque Nacional del Este—, which protects coral reefs, caves with Taíno art and remarkable marine biodiversity.
Saona is the most popular day-trip destination in the Dominican Caribbean. Between the protected nature of the south and the resort strip of the east, La Altagracia combines mass tourism with enclaves of great natural, historical and religious value.
La Romana owes its name, according to the most widely accepted tradition, to a large scale or «romana» —a steelyard balance— used in the small port to weigh the goods (tallow, mahogany, wax) shipped out from the mouth of the river that today bears the city's name. The settlement took shape around 1851 around that natural anchorage on the Caribbean Sea.
Through the nineteenth century it was barely a village of fishermen and woodcutters, dependent on the eastern region. Its take-off would come with the new century and with a crop that would completely transform its landscape and its economy: sugar cane.
In 1912 the South Porto Rico Sugar Company acquired some twenty thousand acres of land north of La Romana to plant cane. The real push came in 1917 with the installation of a mill, and by 1922 the Central Romana carried out its first harvest with the capacity to grind two thousand tons of cane a day. The city grew to the rhythm of the factory, the wharf and the bateyes, the cane workers' settlements.
In 1967 the company passed into the hands of the Gulf & Western conglomerate and, in 1984, to the Fanjul Group, its current owner. The Central Romana came to be one of the largest private employers in the country, with tens of thousands of workers, and branded the working-class, migrant and sugar-growing identity of the whole province.
In the 1970s, La Romana began a second transformation with the boom in luxury tourism. Charles Bluhdorn, president of Gulf & Western, drove the Casa de Campo complex, today one of the most exclusive resorts in the Caribbean, with world-famous golf courses —the celebrated «Teeth of the Dog»—, a marina, private villas and a wide range of sports.
This development diversified an economy that until then had been almost entirely built on sugar, and turned La Romana into one of the gateways for international tourism to the Dominican east, with its own international airport and a cruise terminal.
On a promontory overlooking the Chavón River stands Altos de Chavón, a recreation of a sixteenth-century Mediterranean village built in coral stone, conceived by Bluhdorn as a gift for his daughter. It holds an open-air amphitheater where great international artists have performed, a design school tied to Parsons of New York and a notable Regional Archaeological Museum devoted to Taíno culture.
Altos de Chavón has become one of the country's cultural icons, a place where tourism crosses paths with art, music and the indigenous memory of Hispaniola.
Made an independent province in 1944 —split off from the old province of El Seibo—, La Romana today combines the drive of the sugar agro-industry with high-end tourism and a lively urban life. The city keeps its central park, its Santa Rosa de Lima cathedral and a strong identity bound up with baseball and music.
Between the cane fields of the Central Romana, the greens of Casa de Campo and the stone alleys of Altos de Chavón, the province sums up like few others the double soul of the Dominican east: that of the sugar that forged its history and that of the tourism that defines its present.
La Concepción de La Vega is one of the oldest cities in the Americas: it was founded by Christopher Columbus around 1494-1495 in the fertile Cibao valley, near the gold mines that drew the first conquistadors. The 'Vega Real' was in those years one of the main settlements on the island, with a gold smelting house, a Franciscan monastery and a fortress, until a violent earthquake destroyed it on December 2, 1562.
The city was rebuilt on its present site, beside the Camú River. The province preserves the archaeological ruins of La Vega Vieja, a testimony to that first city, today a historic national park and a window onto the earliest years of colonization.
Very close to La Vega Vieja rises the Santo Cerro, one of the places most laden with history and devotion in the country. According to tradition, Christopher Columbus planted a cross there, and in 1495, during a clash between Taínos and Spaniards, the Virgen de las Mercedes appeared and drove off the indigenous warriors. It was in the Vega Real that the first indigenous people were baptized and Christianity entered America.
The Santo Cerro, with its shrine dedicated to the Virgen de las Mercedes —patroness of the Dominican Republic—, is today a place of pilgrimage and a privileged lookout over the Cibao valley.
The province takes in a good part of the Cordillera Central, the great mountainous backbone of the island, where Pico Duarte rises: at 3,087 meters it is the highest summit in the whole Caribbean. Surrounded by the Armando Bermúdez and José del Carmen Ramírez national parks, its ascent —several days through pine forests— is the great mountain adventure of the country. During the dictatorship it was for a time called 'Pico Trujillo'.
The nation's main rivers rise in these mountains, such as the Yaque del Norte and the Yuna, and here creole pine forests are preserved along with a cool climate that contrasts sharply with the tropical coasts.
In the heights of La Vega lie the capitals of Dominican ecotourism. Jarabacoa, the 'City of Eternal Spring', ringed by pine woods, rivers and waterfalls such as the Salto de Jimenoa and the Salto de Baiguate, is the mecca of rafting, paragliding and adventure sports. Constanza, the highest inhabited valley in the country —at some 1,200 meters—, is famous for its cool climate and for its production of vegetables, flowers, strawberries and garlic, which supply the entire nation.
This mountain climate, unique in the Caribbean, has made the area a refuge from the heat and a nature destination that is increasingly popular among Dominicans and foreign visitors alike.
The city of La Vega is famous for celebrating the Carnaval Vegano, considered the most traditional, the oldest and the most spectacular in the Dominican Republic. Its stars are the diablos cojuelos, characters in colorful, elaborate masks with horns and big teeth, whose costumes come with vejigas —inflated bladders with which they playfully strike the crowd— that are true works of craftsmanship. The modern figure of the diablo cojuelo of La Vega goes back to the beginning of the twentieth century.
Every Sunday in February, the comparsa troupes take over the streets in a festival whose roots reach back to colonial times and which is today one of the country's great cultural attractions.
The province is named after María Trinidad Sánchez (1794-1845), one of the great heroines of Dominican independence. Together with Concepción Bona she made the first national flag, which was flown for the first time on February 27, 1844, at the Puerta del Conde, and she prepared and hid in her own skirts the gunpowder and cartridges used by the Trinitarios on that founding night.
Committed to the cause to the very end, she refused to betray the conspirators fighting the annexationist Pedro Santana and was executed by firing squad on February 27, 1845, exactly one year after independence. Her martyrdom made her a symbol of courage and patriotic loyalty, and in 1959 the province took her name.
The territory of the present-day province, on the Atlantic coast of the northeast, formed part in pre-Columbian times of the Taíno domains of the chiefdom of Maguá. During the colonial period it was a region of forests, coconut groves and small cattle ranches, sparsely populated and tied to neighboring Samaná and the lower Yuna.
Its capital, Nagua, grew as a farming and fishing center. The province was organized in the mid-twentieth century and was divided into the municipalities of Nagua, Cabrera, El Factor and Río San Juan, forming a strikingly beautiful coastal strip between the Atlantic and the foothills of the Cordillera Septentrional.
The economy of María Trinidad Sánchez rests on agriculture, cattle raising and fishing. The province is one of the country's great coconut producers —its endless coconut groves are part of its characteristic landscape— and also of rice, grown on the flood-prone plains near the lower Yuna, as well as cacao.
The coast supports intense fishing activity and, increasingly, tourism. The combination of tropical agriculture and marine resources defines the economic profile of this coastal province of the eastern Cibao.
The province's great attraction is its little-developed beaches of wild beauty. In Cabrera, the cliffs and coves such as Playa Diamante and the Dudú lagoon —a turquoise cenote surrounded by vegetation— draw travelers looking for nature. Río San Juan, with the famous Laguna Gri-Gri and its mangroves, is another of the most photographed corners of the northeast.
Still far from mass tourism, these places make María Trinidad Sánchez a destination for ecotourism and quiet beaches, very different from the country's big resort hubs.
Today María Trinidad Sánchez is a coastal and farming province in the northeast, with an economy built on coconut, rice, cacao, cattle and fishing, and where nature tourism is gaining ground in Cabrera and Río San Juan.
Nagua, its capital, on the Atlantic, is a quiet city growing to the rhythm of agribusiness and tourism. Among endless coconut groves, unspoiled beaches, lagoons and mangroves, and the constant memory of the heroine who sewed the first flag and gave her life for her country, the province combines natural beauty, agricultural wealth and a strong symbolic weight in Dominican national memory.
The intermontane valley where the province lies was known to the conquistadors as the «Sabana de Bonao», taking the Taíno name of the region. Those lands, rich in alluvial gold, were part of the Indigenous domains of the center of the island and were among the first worked by the Spanish.
Bartolomé Colón, the Admiral's younger brother, founded a fort here around 1495-1497, and Bonao became one of the most important settlements on Hispaniola during the first years of colonization, tied to the gold washings and to the road linking Santo Domingo with the Cibao.
The province of Monseñor Nouel was created by splitting the province of La Vega on September 10, 1982, coming into force on January 1, 1983. It was named in honor of Dr. and Monsignor Adolfo Alejandro Nouel, Archbishop of Santo Domingo, who went on to hold the presidency of the Republic in 1912-1913, in an attempt to pacify the country in turbulent times.
Its capital, Bonao, is popularly known as the «Villa de las Hortensias» for the abundance of this flower, and also as a cradle of artists and intellectuals, among them the celebrated painter Cándido Bidó.
Monseñor Nouel is the great center of Dominican metal mining. Within its territory, the company Falconbridge Dominicana has for decades worked the ferronickel deposits of the Loma de la Peguera, today the country's main metal mining activity and an important source of foreign exchange and jobs.
This industry transformed the local economy in the second half of the twentieth century, drawing population and urban growth to Bonao, though it also sparked environmental debate over its impact on the province's mountain surroundings.
Beyond mining, the province's economy rests on agriculture. Its main products are rice, grown in the low, humid lands of the valley, along with the coffee and cacao of the higher areas. Cattle raising rounds out the productive picture.
Set in the geographic center of the country, between the Cordillera Central and the Cibao valley, the province has a green, mountainous relief, with reservoirs such as Hatillo and landscapes that make it an unavoidable stop and resting place on the route between Santo Domingo and Santiago.
Beyond ferronickel and rice, Bonao takes pride in its cultural life. The city was the birthplace of the painter Cándido Bidó, one of the most important figures in twentieth-century Dominican art, whose distinctive world of blues, suns and peasant women gave the province international projection. The Plaza de la Cultura that bears his name keeps that legacy alive.
Set in the center of the country, surrounded by green mountains, reservoirs and river bathing spots, Monseñor Nouel combines the strength of its mining and farming economy with a remarkable artistic movement and a lush natural setting that have made it an unavoidable resting place on the route between the two great Dominican cities.
The beginnings of Monte Cristi go back to 1506, with a fishing village established by order of Nicolás de Ovando at the northwestern tip of the island. Its founding as a town is usually dated to 1533, when it was resettled by some sixty families from the Canary Islands led by Juan de Bolaños.
Like the rest of the northern coast, it suffered the Osorio devastations of the early seventeenth century, which emptied it in order to stamp out smuggling. It revived slowly, always marked by its border position and by the imposing profile of El Morro, the rocky plateau of some 237 meters that rises alone beside the sea and gives the whole province its identity.
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, Monte Cristi enjoyed a time of great economic splendor. Its port exported bananas, tobacco and precious woods from the Cibao, and the city was at the forefront of progress: it had one of the country's first aqueducts, railways and telephones.
From that prosperity remain handsome Victorian-style houses and the famous public clock brought from France, testimony to a cosmopolitan city that was, for a time, one of the main commercial centers of the Republic.
In 1895 the city was the setting for an event central to the history of the Americas: the Manifesto of Montecristi, signed on March 25 by the Cuban independence leader José Martí and the Dominican general Máximo Gómez. The document laid the ideological foundations of Cuba's war of independence against Spain.
The house where Martí stayed is a museum today, and the event ties this border province forever to the Caribbean's struggle for liberation. Máximo Gómez, a Dominican from Baní, would become the generalissimo of the Cuban Liberation Army.
The arid, coastal geography of Monte Cristi has made salt one of its traditional resources: its salt flats use the sun and the northwestern wind to produce sea salt. Fishing and, increasingly, ecotourism round out the provincial economy.
Monte Cristi National Park protects El Morro, the Siete Hermanos cays, mangroves and a rich marine and bird ecosystem. The Yaque del Norte, the country's longest river, empties into this area, and the combination of sea, salt flats, reefs and coastal desert makes the province a singular natural destination.
Raised to the rank of province in 1879, Monte Cristi keeps its character as border and cattle country, with the official crossing into Haiti at nearby Dajabón and an economy of agriculture, salt, fishing and nature tourism. Rice and bananas from the Línea Noroeste, sugarcane and goat raising complete its productive base.
With its Morro, its salt flats, its Victorian heritage and its memory of Martí, Monte Cristi preserves the air of a historic city at the Dominican northwestern edge, proud of its prosperous past and of its part in Cuban independence.
The founding of Monte Plata is bound up with one of the most dramatic episodes of the colonial period. On February 19, 1606, a royal decree authorized governor Antonio Osorio to move the coastal towns of the northern shore inland, in order to stop smuggling with French, Dutch and English ships.
These forced destructions, known as the Osorio Devastations, emptied the entire northwestern coast. With the families moved from Montecristi and Puerto Plata, the settlement of Monte Plata was founded in the center of the island, its name combining precisely those of the two communities the settlers came from.
Monte Plata was not the only town born of the devastations. In 1606, with the inhabitants of the destroyed towns of Bayajá and La Yaguana, Bayaguana was founded —its name likewise a fusion of both place names—, today another of the province's municipalities and home to one of the country's most important religious devotions, that of the Santo Cristo de los Milagros.
These resettlement towns were built on land that had belonged to the Taíno chiefdom of Higüey or Cayacoa, in the south-central part of the island, and were tied from the outset to the cattle raising and farming of the interior.
The economy of Monte Plata is essentially agricultural and livestock-based. Raising cattle for the dairy industry is one of its most important activities, along with growing cacao and sugarcane, the latter historically linked to the sugar mills of the east.
Its municipalities —Monte Plata, Bayaguana, Sabana Grande de Boyá, Yamasá and Peralvillo— make up a rural province of savannas, pastures and plantations, lying a little over a hundred kilometers northeast of Santo Domingo.
Lying a little over a hundred kilometers northeast of Santo Domingo, the province benefits from its closeness to the capital and from the fertility of its land, which keeps it among the main suppliers of milk, meat and cacao to the national market.
Part of Los Haitises National Park stretches across the northeast of the province, with its limestone mogotes, its mangroves and its caves holding Taíno pictographs. This ecosystem, one of the most singular in the Caribbean, gives Monte Plata remarkable ecotourism potential.
With more than four centuries of history since its founding in the time of the devastations, Monte Plata today combines its calling for cattle and cacao with the natural wealth of Los Haitises, in a quiet, green province of the Dominican center-east.
Monte Plata is also a land of deep popular religiosity. Every year on December 28, Bayaguana hosts the Fiesta del Santo Cristo de los Milagros, one of the country's most important pilgrimages, in which the faithful keep their vows and offer bulls to the patron, in a tradition that fuses Catholicism with popular roots.
The rhythms of palos and salves, the brotherhoods and the devotions of its towns give the province a singular intangible heritage. Between cattle, cacao, sugarcane and faith, Monte Plata keeps alive the memory of the devastations that gave rise to it and a deeply rooted peasant and devout identity.
In pre-Hispanic times, the region of Pedernales belonged to the Taíno chiefdom of Jaragua, one of the five great lordships of the island, ruled by Bohechío and, after his death, famous for its queen Anacaona. It was a land of savannas, mountains and coasts of great natural wealth at the southwestern tip of Quisqueya.
When Hispaniola was divided into a Spanish and a French colony, the Pedernales river was established, by the 1777 treaty, as part of the border. Ever since, this remote corner of the country has been shaped by its condition as a frontier with Haiti, whose town of Anse-à-Pitre lies just across the river.
The first modern, permanent settlements in Pedernales date from the 1920s. In 1927, under the government of Horacio Vásquez, the Dominican state launched a border colonization plan to integrate the area with the rest of the country. Farming families were recruited from Duvergé, Enriquillo and other nearby towns, and on mules and horses they crossed the Sierra de Bahoruco to the savanna of Juan López, where they founded the agricultural colony of Pedernales.
This state-directed settlement, typical of the policies of "Dominicanization" of the border, gave rise to the present-day city, one of the youngest and most isolated in the country.
For much of the twentieth century, the economy of Pedernales revolved around bauxite mining. The first operations were begun by the Alcoa Exploration Company in the 1950s, extracting the ore from the heights of the Sierra de Bahoruco for export.
The company left in 1983 and left behind a serious environmental liability, along with a local economy that had lost its main source of jobs. Since then the province has looked for new alternatives, leaning above all on its extraordinary natural resources.
Pedernales is the province with the largest protected area in the country. At its southwestern tip lies Bahía de las Águilas, an unspoiled beach of white sand and turquoise water considered the most beautiful in the Dominican Republic, sheltered within Jaragua National Park, created in 1983.
The province also holds part of Sierra de Bahoruco National Park, with its forests and its great diversity of orchids and birds, and the striking Hoyo de Pelempito, a deep geological depression with a microclimate of its own. Cabo Rojo, with its flamingos and the Oviedo lagoon, completes this unique natural mosaic.
The Dominican government is now pushing an ambitious tourism master plan at Cabo Rojo, which contemplates thousands of hotel rooms and a cruise port, with the idea of turning Pedernales into a major new tourism hub in the south, building on the fame of Bahía de las Águilas.
The challenge is to make it compatible with the conservation of an exceptional natural heritage. Between the Taíno memory of Jaragua, the legacy of the border colonization and the promise of ecotourism, Pedernales remains the wildest, most remote and most biodiverse corner of the Dominican Republic.
The territory of Peravia was settled by the Spanish from the sixteenth century onward; Columbus himself took shelter from a hurricane in its bay in 1499, and named it Puerto Hermoso. The town of Baní was founded on March 3, 1764, when a group of residents —many of them of Canary Island descent— bought from the owners of Cerro Gordo the land on which to build the village.
The name «Baní» comes from a Taíno chief of the region, and is said to mean «abundance of water», although the province is paradoxically one of the driest in the country. Its location on the southern coastal plain, between arid mountains and the Caribbean Sea, shaped its character.
In 1764, the year of its formal founding, Baní was barely a small village of farmers; over time it became one of the most hardworking and orderly communities in the south, and its people —the banilejos— earned a nationwide reputation for enterprise and thrift.
Baní is the birthplace of Máximo Gómez (1836-1905), one of the greatest military figures in the history of the Americas. Having emigrated to Cuba, he became the generalísimo of the Cuban Liberation Army during the wars of independence against Spain, alongside José Martí, with whom he signed the Manifesto of Montecristi in 1895.
In his home city, a park and a museum dedicated to his memory recall the hero from Baní, a symbol of the historic ties between the Dominican Republic and Cuba and the greatest source of pride in the whole province.
Farming is the main activity in Peravia. Baní is known worldwide as the «mango capital», a fruit grown here year-round and exported; its banilejo variety is highly prized. To that are added vegetables, fruit, coffee from the highlands and salt production at the Las Salinas de Baní salt flats.
The province also has a singular landscape: the Baní dunes, a coastal sand desert declared a natural monument, and the Las Calderas peninsula, with its bay and its naval base. A dry climate, mango, salt and dates define this southern land.
The province was created on November 23, 1944 under the name Provincia de Baní, and formally inaugurated on January 1, 1945. On November 29, 1961, after the fall of Trujillo, it took its present name of Peravia, drawn from an old place name of the region.
With its hardworking, commercial capital, its culture bound to mango and to religious traditions, and the enduring memory of Máximo Gómez, Peravia is one of the provinces with the strongest identity in the Dominican south, less than an hour from the capital.
Baní has a very distinct cultural identity, with strong religious and popular traditions. Its patron saint festivities in honor of Nuestra Señora de Regla, its velaciones and its musical forms are part of the rich intangible heritage of the south.
The city was the birthplace of distinguished intellectuals, musicians and military men, and it preserves an orderly, industrious urban core, a reflection of the enterprising character of its people. Between the desert of the dunes, the salt flats, the coconut palms and the mango groves, Peravia combines singular nature, prosperous farming and a deep cultural tradition that sets it apart within the Dominican south.
The coast of Puerto Plata was sighted by Christopher Columbus in 1493. Dazzled by the silvery gleam of the clouds over the mountain we now call Isabel de Torres, he named the place «Puerto de Plata». Very close by, in the neighboring territory, he had shortly before founded La Isabela, the first permanent European settlement in the New World.
The city of San Felipe de Puerto Plata was formally established in the early sixteenth century by order of Nicolás de Ovando. Its natural harbor soon made it a stop on the trade route between Europe and the Indies, but also a target for smugglers and pirates.
To protect the bay from pirate attacks, the Spanish Crown ordered the building of the San Felipe fortress, begun in the sixteenth century and one of the oldest colonial military structures in the New World, today a museum. Despite its walls, the heavy smuggling in the area led governor Antonio Osorio to carry out in 1605-1606 the so-called devastations, which forcibly depopulated the entire northern coast and ruined the city for more than a century.
Puerto Plata was reborn in the mid-eighteenth century, when Canary Island families resettled the site and the city prospered again on the back of the Cibao tobacco boom, whose crop reached the world through its port.
Puerto Plata is the land of general Gregorio Luperón, one of the great heroes of the War of the Restoration (1863-1865), which won back the country's independence after the annexation to Spain. Merchant, soldier and later President of the Republic, Luperón turned the city into a bastion of liberalism and progress.
During the second half of the nineteenth century, driven by him, Puerto Plata lived a golden age of commercial and cultural splendor: Victorian wooden houses, the first street lighting, newspapers, theater and an intense civic life that earned it the nickname «the Bride of the Atlantic». His equestrian statue presides over the central park today.
Puerto Plata is famous for its amber, a fossil resin millions of years old that here reaches exceptional quality and colors —including the very rare blue amber—, displayed in the city's Amber Museum. The region is also the home of one of the country's best-known rums, with distilleries of long standing.
Above the city rises the Isabel de Torres peak, crowned by a replica of Christ the Redeemer and reached by a cable car, the only one in the Caribbean, from whose summit the whole coast comes into view. Amber, rum and mountain sum up the singular character of this northern province.
In the 1970s, Puerto Plata was the pioneer of mass tourism in the Dominican Republic: the Playa Dorada resort complex, with its large hotels facing the Atlantic, marked the beginning of the industry that today sustains much of the national economy. Its Gregorio Luperón international airport and the Amber Cove cruise port reinforced that role.
Between beaches such as Sosúa and Cabarete —the latter a world capital of windsurfing and kitesurfing—, its historic center of Victorian architecture and its green mountains, Puerto Plata keeps its double status as a historic city and a major tourist destination in the north of the country.
The Samaná peninsula, with its deep, sheltered bay in the northeast of the island, was for centuries a strategic enclave coveted by the European powers. In Taíno times the region formed part of the territories of the chiefdom of Maguá. Christopher Columbus touched these shores in January 1493 and there took part in the first armed clash between Europeans and Indigenous people in the Americas, against the fierce ciguayos, at the spot he named Golfo de las Flechas.
The town of Santa Bárbara de Samaná was officially founded in 1756 with Canary Island families, in an attempt by the Spanish Crown to settle and defend a bay that the French, the English and the Americans eyed with conquest in mind for generations.
The most singular trait of Samaná was born in 1824, during the Haitian occupation of the island. President Jean-Pierre Boyer promoted the immigration of free African Americans from the United States, and some thirty-four families of freedmen arrived in Santa Bárbara de Samaná, most of them from Philadelphia.
Isolated on their peninsula, their descendants —known as «the Americans of Samaná»— preserved for generations an English of their own, Methodist and Baptist churches, Anglo-Saxon surnames such as Green, Johnson or King, religious songs, recipes and customs that still set the community apart today and make Samaná a uniquely Afro-Anglophone corner of the Spanish-speaking world.
Every year, between January and March, thousands of North Atlantic humpback whales migrate to the warm waters of Samaná bay to mate and give birth to their calves. The spectacle of these giants breaching and singing makes the province one of the leading whale-watching destinations on the planet.
The Marine Mammal Sanctuary of the Silver and Navidad Banks, together with the bay itself, protects this migratory route. Whale tourism, along with beaches such as Las Terrenas, Las Galeras and Cayo Levantado and the El Limón waterfall, has made ecotourism the economic engine of the peninsula.
Samaná bay was the object of repeated annexation and lease schemes throughout the nineteenth century: the United States, France and other powers tried to secure it as a naval base, and under the government of Buenaventura Báez agreements were even signed that came close to handing it over. Domestic resistance and international tensions frustrated those plans.
Samaná was created as a province in 1907. Under the Trujillo regime the provincial capital was renamed for a time, and in the mid-twentieth century much of the old town of Santa Bárbara was rebuilt. Even so, the peninsula kept its distinctive look and its African American cultural heritage.
Today Samaná is a byword for lush nature and sustainable tourism: endless coconut palms, unspoiled beaches, mangroves, the nearby Los Haitises National Park and the whale season draw travelers from all over the world. The province lives on fishing, coconut growing and, above all, on an ecotourism that tries to preserve its fragile beauty.
In its streets you can still hear English surnames and Methodist hymns, mixed with merengue and bachata, proof that the peninsula remains a unique crossroads of Africa, the Caribbean and North America.
San Cristóbal stands on the Nigua River, in the south, on lands that in Taíno times belonged to the chiefdoms of the island's south-central region. Its colonial origins are tied to the first gold workings and to the sugar mills the Spanish set up in the Nigua valley as early as the sixteenth century, among the oldest in the Americas.
In its surroundings, caves such as those of El Pomier —the largest body of rock art in the Antilles— preserve thousands of Taíno pictographs and petroglyphs, an exceptional record of the indigenous spiritual world at the gates of the present-day city.
San Cristóbal holds a place of honor in Dominican history as the «Cradle of the Constitution». It was there that the Constituent Congress, meeting from September 21, 1844 under the presidency of Manuel María Valencia, drafted the Republic's first charter, proclaimed on November 6, 1844 and modeled on the Constitution of the United States.
The process was charged with tension between those who aspired to a civil, republican government and those who defended the absolute power of General Pedro Santana. The crisis was settled with the inclusion, forced by Tomás Bobadilla, of the famous Article 210, which granted the president sweeping emergency powers in times of war.
San Cristóbal was also the birthplace of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, the dictator who ruled the country with an iron hand between 1930 and 1961. During his regime the province —which for a time was named Trujillo— received monumental works such as the parish church, the Palacio del Cerro and the Fundación estate, displays of the tyrant's cult of personality.
This double condition —cradle of the first democratic constitution and of the longest-ruling dictator in Dominican history— gives San Cristóbal a singular weight in the country's political memory.
The economy of San Cristóbal has historically been tied to sugar cane and its mills, alongside industry, commerce and farming. Its closeness to the capital has fully integrated it into the economic life of Greater Santo Domingo.
Among its attractions are the Caves of El Pomier, with their Taíno rock art, and freshwater bathing spots such as La Toma, refreshing natural pools that are hugely popular. Constitutional history, Taíno heritage and mountain coolness live side by side in this southern province at the gates of the capital.
Today San Cristóbal is one of the most populous provinces in the country, fully integrated into the sphere of Greater Santo Domingo. Its economy combines industry, commerce, agriculture and intense activity linked to the nearby capital.
The birthplace of musicians and artists, with a strong tradition of merengue and popular culture, the province preserves a heritage that runs from the Taíno caves of El Pomier to the monuments of the Trujillo era, by way of the indelible memory of the 1844 Constitution. Between constitutional memory, indigenous heritage and mountain bathing spots, San Cristóbal holds a central place in Dominican history and life.
In colonial times the territory of San José de Ocoa was an old refuge for rebel and fugitive Black people. According to Archbishop Francisco de la Cueva y Maldonado, the so-called Maniel consisted of some six hundred families in 1662, communities of maroons who had fled slavery and hid in the mountains.
The founding of the settlement of Ocoa is placed around 1750-1760. Tradition tells that it began with a love story between Andrés Pimentel Acevedo and Ana Lucía Tejeda, who took refuge in El Maniel, at the Rancho de la Vigía. The province thus has its roots in the resistance of the slaves who fled to the heights of the Cordillera Central.
For much of its history, San José de Ocoa depended administratively on other jurisdictions. In 1944, the común of Baní and that of San José de Ocoa made up the province of Baní. San José de Ocoa was finally raised to an independent province on September 6, 2000 through Law 66, although it did not take effect until January 1, 2002.
It is therefore the youngest province in the Dominican Republic. In 1973, the Sabana Larga area was the scene of fierce fighting between the Dominican army and a guerrilla group led by Colonel Francisco Alberto Caamaño, who sought to overthrow President Joaquín Balaguer.
Farming is the main economic activity of this highland province. Its most important products are coffee, potatoes, beans, avocado, carrots, cabbage and peanuts, high-altitude crops favored by its cool climate and its mountain valleys.
In the Mahoma mountains, in Rancho Arriba, the renowned Samir coffee is produced, grown between 900 and 1,050 meters above sea level and exported to France, Italy and Japan, proof of the quality of Ocoa's high-altitude coffees.
San José de Ocoa is famous for its strong tradition of community organization and development, tied indelibly to the figure of Father Luis Quinn, a priest known as the «protector of the poor». Over his lifetime he drove the construction of thousands of homes, schools, clinics, community centers, roads and even a hydroelectric dam.
His legacy is preserved in the Museo-Casa de los Recuerdos in the provincial capital and in the Association for the Development of San José de Ocoa, a national model of community work. High-altitude coffee, green mountains and a spirit of solidarity define this young province.
Today San José de Ocoa is one of the youngest and at the same time most singular provinces in the country, a mountain enclave where highland farming, nature tourism and a deep-rooted culture of community work shape daily life. Its valleys, dams and ravines draw visitors looking for fresh air, hiking and river bathing spots a few hours from the capital.
Between the memory of the maniel of the runaways, the export coffee of Rancho Arriba, the legacy of Father Luis Quinn and its models of community organization, the province projects an identity of collective effort and green mountains that sets it apart within the Dominican south.
The San Juan valley was the heart of the Taíno chiefdom of Maguana, one of the five great domains of the island, ruled by the fearsome chief Caonabo —whose name is said to mean «great lord of the land»—, husband of Queen Anacaona and one of the fiercest opponents of the Spanish conquest.
At the heart of this valley lies the Corral de los Indios, an enigmatic circle of stones that, according to researchers, was a ceremonial center or batey where the Taínos held rites and ball games. The name «Maguana» is said to mean «the first stone, the only stone», a sign of the sacred character this place held for the indigenous people.
San Juan de la Maguana was one of the first cities founded on the island, around 1503, taking its name from Saint John the Baptist and from the Taíno place name of the valley. From its beginnings it was a flourishing town thanks to the richness of its flora, the mildness of its climate and the early cultivation of sugar cane as a commercial venture.
Over the centuries the city kept its role as the center of the inland southwest, a meeting point of roads and the marketplace of a vast farming and cattle-raising region set between the Cordillera Central and the Sierra de Neiba.
San Juan is known as «the granary of the south» or «the granary of the Republic» for the enormous agricultural productivity of its valley. As early as 1926, President Horacio Vázquez declared the lands of San Juan de la Maguana an agricultural zone and promoted the construction of the Juan de Herrera canal, opened that same year, which transformed irrigation in the valley.
Today its plains produce large quantities of rice, beans, pigeon peas, corn and other grains that supply much of the country, making agriculture the undisputed pillar of the provincial economy.
San Juan de la Maguana was a municipality of Azua province until 1938, when the Trujillo regime raised it to the rank of province under the name Benefactor, one of the dictator's epithets. After the fall of the regime, it recovered its historic name of San Juan.
The cradle of deeply rooted popular religious traditions —such as the cult of Liborio Mateo, a messianic leader of the early twentieth century— and of a strong rural identity, San Juan combines its Taíno heritage, its colonial history and its standing as the great agricultural pantry of the Dominican south.
San Juan is famous for its popular religiosity and its syncretic traditions. In its countryside, at the beginning of the twentieth century, arose the movement of Olivorio Mateo, «Papá Liborio», a messianic leader and healer whose memory lives on in cults and pilgrimages across the region, an expression of the rich spiritual universe of the deep south.
The Corral de los Indios, the river bathing spots, the music of guloyas and palos, and a cuisine based on the grains of the valley complete the identity of San Juan. Between the Taíno heritage of the Maguana chiefdom, the fertility of its valley and its vibrant popular culture, San Juan de la Maguana stands as the great historical and agricultural center of the Dominican southwest.
The origins of San Pedro de Macorís go back to the beginning of the nineteenth century, when people fleeing the Haitian occupation formed the hamlets of Mosquito and Sol at the mouth of the Higuamo River. The two communities grew until they merged into a single town, which took its name from the apostle Saint Peter and from the old indigenous place name «Macorís», linked to the macorige peoples who inhabited the region before the conquest.
Its position on the Higuamo, with a natural harbor open to the Caribbean Sea, would prove decisive: for decades the ships loaded with sugar that made the city's fortune would sail from there.
At the end of the nineteenth century, Cuban immigrants fleeing the wars of independence brought their experience in growing cane and drove the sugar industry until it became the main activity of the entire east of the country. At the beginning of the twentieth century, mills such as Porvenir, Angelina, Consuelo and Quisqueya came to account for close to seventy percent of national sugar production.
The San Pedro dock became the most important port in the Republic, and the city lived a golden age of wealth, stately architecture and cultural ferment that earned it the poetic nickname of «the Sultana of the East».
The expansion of the sugar mills drew thousands of workers from the English-speaking islands of the Caribbean —Saint Kitts, Nevis, Anguilla, Tortola—, known in the country as cocolos. Their arrival left an indelible mark on the culture of the province: they introduced Protestantism, Sunday schools, the English language, foods such as the yaniqueque and, above all, the theatrical Guloya dances.
The guloyas of San Pedro, with their colorful costumes, their masks and their drums, were declared by UNESCO a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, living testimony to the Afro-Antillean blending that defines the identity of San Pedro.
No other city in the world has produced as many Major League players in proportion to its size as San Pedro de Macorís. The province is recognized as the cradle of Dominican baseball and has produced more big-league players than many entire nations.
From its bateyes and pastures came figures such as Sammy Sosa, Alfonso Soriano, Rico Carty, Pedro Guerrero, Tony Fernández and Robinson Canó. Baseball, inherited from contact with Cuba and the cocolos, became the great passion and a genuine path of social advancement for generations of the city's young people.
Now a province and with a substantial university life —it is home to the Universidad Central del Este—, San Pedro de Macorís keeps its character as a port, industrial and sugar-cane city, complemented today by free-trade zones and by tourism on the nearby Juan Dolio coast. Its seafront promenade on the Higuamo, its San Pedro Apóstol cathedral and its mansions from the belle époque of sugar recall the days of splendor.
Between sugar, the guloyas and baseball, the Sultana of the East preserves an unmistakable identity, a mixture of cane work, Afro-Antillean heritage and sporting pride.
Santiago de los Caballeros was founded in 1495, during Christopher Columbus's second voyage, in the fertile Cibao valley on the banks of the Yaque del Norte River. Tradition holds that thirty noblemen —the Thirty Knights— took part in its establishment, hence the city's full name. It is the first town on the continent to bear the name of the apostle Saint James.
After being flattened by an earthquake, it was refounded on its present site in 1562. From then on it consolidated itself as the great center of the island's interior and as the natural head of the whole Cibao region, the agricultural heart of Hispaniola.
Santiago played a decisive part in the wars of the 19th century. It was a strategic center during the War of Independence and, above all, it acted as capital of the Republic during the War of Restoration (1863-1865), the feat that gave the country back its sovereignty after the annexation to Spain.
The main episodes of that war took place in the city and its surroundings, and in their memory the imposing Monument to the Heroes of the Restoration was raised in the 20th century, a tower that dominates the urban landscape and has become the symbol of Santiago par excellence.
Santiago built its modern identity on tobacco, rum and textiles. The fertile soil of the Cibao valley made the region the granary of the Dominican Republic, and the tobacco industry developed here some of the best cigars in the Caribbean, a tradition that continues with brands exported all over the world.
The city is home to large tobacco and rum factories, and its Centro León and its Tobacco Museum bear witness to that legacy. Tobacco did not only bring wealth to Santiago: it also forged a merchant and educated bourgeoisie that shaped Dominican politics and culture.
As capital of the Cibao, Santiago has always been an economic and cultural engine of the country. Its university —the PUCMM—, its industries, its free trade zones and its intense commercial life make it the second city of the Dominican Republic. The cibaeño accent, the traditional music of perico ripiao and merengue de tambora are part of the national imagination.
The Monument to the Heroes, the Cathedral of Santiago Apóstol, the Gran Teatro del Cibao and the historic Centro León make up an urban heritage that combines heroic memory with the modernity of a thriving metropolis.
Today the province of Santiago is one of the most populated and prosperous in the country, with a diversified economy that combines tobacco agroindustry, free trade zone manufacturing, trade and services. Its Cibao international airport connects it with the world and has made it the great gateway to the Dominican interior.
Proud of its founding history, of its role in the Restoration and of its tobacco tradition, Santiago de los Caballeros remains the undisputed heart of the Cibao and one of the cities with the strongest identity of its own in the whole Dominican Republic.
The municipality of San Ignacio de Sabaneta, capital of the province, took shape in the 1840s in the Línea Noroeste, the region of the Yaque valley close to the border with Haiti. In 1855 it was raised to the category of a municipality under Santiago, and when Monte Cristi gained provincial rank in 1879 it became part of that new jurisdiction.
It is a land of savannas, rivers and mountains, crossed by the Cordillera Central, with a traditionally farming and cattle-raising economy and a history deeply tied to the patriotic struggles of the 19th century.
Very close to Sabaneta, on the hill of Capotillo, the Grito de Capotillo was raised on August 16, 1863, starting the War of Restoration against the annexation to Spain. That day, fourteen patriots crossed over from Juana Méndez, in Haiti, and raised the tricolor flag on Dominican soil, in a group headed by Santiago Rodríguez and joined by Benito Monción and José Cabrera.
In Sabaneta, the restorationists held a convention to settle the plans for the war that would give the country back its independence. The conflict ended politically on March 3, 1865, when Spain annulled the annexation, and definitively with the evacuation of the Spanish troops that same year.
The province is named after Santiago Rodríguez Masagó, considered the 'father of the Restoration' for his founding role in the Grito de Capotillo and in the organization of the restorationist movement. On October 22, 1936, the municipality of San Ignacio de Sabaneta was given the name of Santiago Rodríguez in his honor.
On May 13, 1948, Santiago Rodríguez was raised to the category of a province. A monument at the entrance to its capital recalls the heroes of the Sabaneta uprising of February 22, 1863, the prelude to the great restorationist feat.
The economy of Santiago Rodríguez is fundamentally farming and cattle raising: rice, coffee, tobacco, peanuts and various products of the Línea Noroeste are grown, and livestock also carries important weight. Its border condition links it to trade and to the historic dynamics of the Dominican-Haitian frontier.
Among its natural attractions, the Armando Bermúdez National Park and the foothills of the Cordillera Central stand out, along with the rivers and bathing spots of the area. Restorationist history, agriculture and mountain landscape define this proud province of the northwest.
The hill of Capotillo, where the Dominican flag flew again in 1863, is today a place of patriotic pilgrimage and a national symbol of the Restoration. Every August 16 the date of the Grito is commemorated throughout the Republic as Restoration Day, keeping alive the memory of the feat that was born in this land.
Beyond its historical weight, Santiago Rodríguez is a rural, mountainous province of farming, cattle and nature. Between the rivers and bathing spots of the Línea Noroeste, the foothills of the Cordillera Central and the pride of having been the cradle of the second independence, the province keeps an identity deeply bound to the history of the nation.
Long before Santo Domingo became the first permanent European city of the New World, founded in 1498 on the eastern bank of the Ozama River, these lands were inhabited by Taíno communities belonging to the chiefdom of Higüey or Caizcimú, at the southeastern end of the island that its people called Quisqueya. The Ozama, Isabela and Haina rivers, along with the coastal lagoons, offered abundant fishing and fertile soils to those first inhabitants.
The many limestone cave systems of the territory —today inside the metropolitan area— served the Taíno as shelters, cemeteries and ritual sanctuaries, and many of them still preserve petroglyphs and pictographs. With colonization, the land around the primate city was organized into cattle estates and farmsteads that supplied meat, casabe and produce to the colonial capital.
A few kilometers east of the historic center, Los Tres Ojos National Park holds a spectacular system of limestone caverns with four lakes of crystal-clear water, formed thousands of years ago by a natural geological collapse. Before the Spanish arrived, the Taíno considered these mirrors of water sacred places, a source of drinking water and the setting for spiritual rituals.
Excavations have revealed petroglyphs, pottery and archaeological evidence dated between the years 1000 and 1300 of our era, which makes the site a living testimony of the Taíno spiritual world a step away from the great metropolis. Today it is one of the most visited natural monuments in the country.
The province's coastline, on the Caribbean Sea, is home to Boca Chica, one of the most classic and busiest bathing resorts in the country. Set on the bay of Andrés, some thirty kilometers east of the capital, its shallow lagoon sheltered by a reef made it, from the middle of the 20th century on, the favorite weekend beach for the people of the capital.
Alongside Boca Chica, the coastal strip toward Juan Dolio and the river mouths has combined small-scale fishing, sun-and-beach tourism and an intense weekend life, tying the province into the tourist circuit of the Dominican southeast.
The province of Santo Domingo is one of the youngest in the country: it was created on October 16, 2001 by Law 163-01, which separated it from the Distrito Nacional in response to the dizzying territorial and demographic growth of the capital's metropolitan area. It was originally made up of the municipalities of Santo Domingo Este, Santo Domingo Norte, Santo Domingo Oeste and Boca Chica.
In this way, the old Distrito Nacional was reduced to the city of Santo Domingo de Guzmán proper, while the great suburban ring around it became an administrative entity of its own, the new province of Santo Domingo.
With more than two and a half million inhabitants, the province of Santo Domingo is the most populated in the Dominican Republic and, together with the Distrito Nacional, forms Greater Santo Domingo, the largest urban conglomeration in the insular Caribbean. Its municipalities concentrate extensive residential areas, industrial parks, shopping centers and a good part of the country's economic activity.
Santo Domingo Este, its head municipality, is today one of the most populated cities in the country. The province works as the capital's great dormitory, industrial and service belt, a place where metropolitan modernity, Caribbean bathing resorts and a natural heritage with Taíno roots live side by side.
Cotuí, capital of the province, was founded as one of the towns that governor Nicolás de Ovando ordered to be settled between 1502 and 1509, around a gold mine. The place owes its name to an indigenous chief called Cotoy, who ruled the region, a nitaíno of the chiefdom of Maguá.
The conquistadors destroyed the Taíno community and enslaved its inhabitants to work the gold of the area, thus opening a mining vocation that, five centuries later, still defines the province. Cotuí is therefore one of the oldest settlements in the interior of the island, born of gold and of the conquest.
The province was created in 1952 and was named in honor of Juan Sánchez Ramírez, hero of the Reconquista and a native of this region. In 1808-1809, Sánchez Ramírez led the movement that drove the French out of the eastern part of the island —at the battle of Palo Hincado— and returned the territory to Spanish sovereignty, in the period known as the 'España Boba'.
That heroic past sits alongside the mining and farming character of a province set in the eastern Cibao, between the valley and the mountain foothills, crossed by the Yuna River and dotted with reservoirs.
The Yuna River and the Hatillo and Rincón reservoirs, among the largest in the country, water its lands and generate power, reinforcing the province's role as a key enclave of natural resources in the eastern Cibao.
Cotuí's gold tradition came back strongly in the 20th century. In the mid-1970s, the state-owned company Rosario Dominicana began extracting gold and silver from the Pueblo Viejo deposits, operating until 1998 and becoming a symbol of national mining.
After years of inactivity, the deposit was reactivated on a large scale: today the open-pit Pueblo Viejo mine is the largest gold mine in Latin America and one of the biggest in the world, providing a very significant share of the Dominican Republic's exports.
Besides gold, the province is rich in other resources. Its low, humid lands, tied to the Yuna River, are major rice producers, one of the pillars of its agriculture along with cacao and other crops. The Hatillo reservoir and the others in the area supply water and power.
The combination of world-scale gold mining with a thriving rice-growing agriculture makes Sánchez Ramírez one of the most economically dynamic provinces of the Cibao, though also the setting of debates about the environmental impact of large-scale mining.
Cotuí preserves a valuable colonial and historical heritage as one of the oldest towns in the interior. Its church, its traditions and its patron saint festivals speak of centuries of history bound to gold and to the land.
The province is also famous for its cultural expressions of Afro-Dominican root, such as the Guloyas and, above all, the masks and troupes of its carnivals and festivals, along with palos music. Between the large-scale mining of Pueblo Viejo, the rice fields of the Yuna and a vigorous popular culture, Sánchez Ramírez is a province where the golden past and the productive present live side by side with a very marked identity of its own.
The territory of today's Valverde province, at least in its northwestern part, was one of the first non-coastal regions explored by Europeans. Its closeness to La Isabela —the first town founded on the island— and the existence of an accessible way through the Cordillera Septentrional, which Columbus named the «Puerto» or «Paso de los Hidalgos», made it the setting for the first pushes inland toward the Cibao.
Set in the Western Valley of the Cibao, or Yaque valley, the region is popularly known as the Línea Noroeste, a vast plain between mountains watered by the Yaque del Norte, the country's longest river.
The great turning point in the history of Valverde came in 1918, when the Belgian engineer Luis L. Bogaert —«Monsieur Bogart», a resident of the country— built the nation's first irrigation canal. Watering the valley's dry lands made intensive rice growing possible.
This transformed the region completely: from arid cattle country it became, over time, one of the country's main farming areas. The water of the Yaque, channeled through canals, brought forth a prosperous agriculture that would define the province's future.
Mao, the provincial capital, is today the most important city of the Línea Noroeste and the world capital of organic bananas, as well as the country's second largest rice producer. Its organic banana plantations, many of them certified for export to Europe and the United States, have made the province an international reference point for this crop.
Rice, organic bananas, plantains and other farm products drive the economy of an overwhelmingly agricultural province, whose prosperity contrasts with the original dryness of these northwestern lands.
Mao is now the tenth most important population center in the Dominican Republic and the great urban hub of the Línea Noroeste, with intense commercial, agro-industrial and service activity tied to banana exports and rice production.
Valverde province was created when Santiago province was divided on August 11, 1959, and it was named in honor of General José Desiderio Valverde, who served as president of the Republic in the nineteenth century.
With its thriving capital, its irrigated farmland and its leadership in organic bananas, Valverde is one of the most dynamic provinces of the Línea Noroeste. The water of the Yaque, tamed a century ago by Bogaert's canal, remains the key to its wealth and to its identity as a green granary in the middle of the dry northwest.
Mao and Valverde province have a cultural identity closely bound to the Línea Noroeste, with its music, its patron saint festivals and its strong farming tradition. The city, modern and commercial, is one of the development poles of the Dominican northwest.
The province is also known for its carnival and for its popular traditions. Between the irrigation canals that tamed the Yaque valley, the plantations of organic bananas and rice, and a thriving urban life, Valverde embodies the transformation of an arid land into one of the most productive and dynamic granaries of the Dominican Republic.