Long before becoming a tourist destination, Saona Island and the whole southeast region of Hispaniola were inhabited by the Taíno, the people of Arawak origin who dominated the Antilles at the arrival of the Europeans. This area was part of the chiefdom of Higüey, one of the five great domains into which the island was divided, and was linked to the figure of the cacique Cotubanamá, a Taíno leader of the region whose name is now borne by the national park that protects the island.
The Taíno of the area lived from fishing, the gathering of shellfish and fruit, hunting and the cultivation of cassava. Saona, because of its location and its marine wealth, was a territory known and used by these seafaring peoples. The island preserves in its caves archaeological traces of that presence: Taíno pictographs and petroglyphs that bear witness to their everyday life, their spirituality and their relationship with the environment.
This Indigenous heritage is the oldest layer of the history of Saona and of the whole Dominican east. The choice of the name 'Cotubanamá' for the national park that protects it is a recognition of that Taíno root, and the caves with rock art in the region are today a valuable archaeological heritage that connects the island with its first inhabitants.
The island's current name was born in the midst of the conquest, tied to Christopher Columbus himself. During his second voyage to the New World, in 1494, Columbus navigated the southern coasts of Hispaniola and reached this island. Historical tradition tells that he named it 'Savona' in honor of the Italian city of Savona, in the Liguria region, from which his traveling companion and friend Michele da Cuneo came. According to the account, Columbus is said to have symbolically 'given' the island to Da Cuneo, who gave it the name of his hometown.
With the passage of time, the Italian place name 'Savona' gradually transformed in local pronunciation and spelling until it became 'Saona', the name by which it's known today. It's one of those cases in which a European name, brought from a corner of the Mediterranean, was fixed forever on a Caribbean island, coexisting with the Taíno heritage of the territory.
Michele da Cuneo, a chronicler and participant in the second Columbian voyage, left accounts of that expedition, which helps document this episode. Thus, in the name of Saona two worlds coexist: that of the Taíno who inhabited it for centuries and that of the European navigators who arrived at the end of the 15th century and renamed it after an Italian city.
After the conquest and the rapid disappearance of the Taíno population, Saona Island —like much of the Dominican east— entered a long stage of isolation. With no great resources to exploit and far from the colonial centers of power of Santo Domingo, the island remained practically uninhabited for centuries, inhabited only sporadically by fishermen who made use of its waters rich in fish, lobster and shellfish.
Over time, a small fishing community established itself on the island, whose main settlement is the village of Mano Juan, with its characteristic wooden houses painted in colors facing the beach. That fishing life, simple and tied to the sea, was for a long time the only stable human presence on Saona, and even today it's part of its identity and its cultural appeal for visitors.
This long isolation, which for centuries meant marginality, was paradoxically what preserved the island. While other coasts transformed, Saona kept its palm groves, its white-sand beaches and its reefs intact. When tourist and conservationist interest arrived in the 20th century, the island was still an almost unspoiled natural paradise, which laid the foundations for its protection as a natural area.
The great turning point in Saona's modern history came in 1975, when the island was included in the newly created Del Este National Park, one of the most important protected areas in the Dominican Republic. The goal was to conserve the area's exceptional ecosystem: the white-sand beaches, the extensive mangroves, the coral reefs, the seagrass meadows and the rich terrestrial and marine fauna, which includes sea turtles, manatees, dolphins, a great variety of birds and endemic species.
Over time, the park came to be called Cotubanamá National Park, in homage to the region's Taíno cacique, reinforcing the link between the conservation of nature and the memory of the native peoples. The legal protection established rules for visiting the island, regulating the tourist activity and preserving both the environment and the archaeological heritage of the caves with Taíno art found in the park area.
That protected status is the key that explains today's Saona: although the island receives thousands of visitors a year through the excursions, its national-park status has allowed it to keep its natural beauty and limit development. There are no resorts or large buildings, and there's an effort to reconcile tourism with the care of the ecosystem. Saona is, in that sense, an example of how conservation can coexist with mass tourism if there's a protective framework to support it.
In recent decades, hand in hand with the tourism boom of the Dominican east, Saona Island became one of the country's tourist icons and the most popular day excursion in the Dominican Caribbean. The proximity to the great vacation hubs —Punta Cana, Bávaro, La Romana, Bayahíbe— and the extraordinary beauty of its beaches transformed it into a must-see destination for the millions of visitors who come to the region each year.
The image of Saona —white sand, coconut palms, turquoise water and the 'natural pool' with starfish— became one of the most recognizable postcards of the Caribbean, spread in brochures, tourism campaigns and social media all over the world. It has even been the setting for advertising shoots and productions seeking the image of the tropical paradise. That fame, however, poses the permanent challenge of balancing the enormous number of visitors with the conservation of the environment.
Today, the story of Saona continues to be written in that tension between the paradise and its preservation: the island is at once an economic engine for Bayahíbe and the region, and a protected area that depends on responsible tourism to keep intact the beauty that made it famous. Visiting it with respect —caring for the wildlife, not touching the starfish or the corals and leaving no trash— is the best way to ensure that future generations can keep enjoying this corner of the Caribbean.