🇩🇴 Dominican Republic · Southwest (Barahona)
Pedernales is the most remote and southwestern province of the Dominican Republic, right against the border with Haiti and bathed by the Caribbean Sea. Far from the big tourist circuits of the east, it offers one of the most unspoiled and spectacular coastlines in the country, along with extraordinary nature protected in national parks. It's the destination for those seeking almost-deserted beaches, rugged landscapes and adventure, far from the resorts.
Its great jewel is Bahía de las Águilas, within Jaragua National Park, considered by many the most beautiful beach in the country: eight kilometers of dazzling white sand and turquoise water without a single building. But Pedernales is much more: the adjacent Sierra de Bahoruco National Park, a refuge for orchids and endemic birds; the salt flats and the flamingos; fishing villages like Cabo Rojo and La Cueva; and a border culture with a strong presence of the binational market with Haiti.
Getting here requires time and willingness —it's one of the areas farthest from Santo Domingo—, but the reward is an authentic, wild Caribbean. This guide gathers the practical details for organizing the visit: how to get to Bahía de las Águilas, which parks to tour, where to sleep and eat, and what to keep in mind in a remote region with limited services.
The Pedernales region was Taíno territory and later a border area disputed between the Spanish and French crowns, and later between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, until the border was fixed in the 20th century. Its name refers to the flint stones (pedernal) of the area. Bauxite mining in the mid-20th century boosted the city, today reconverted toward ecotourism. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
There's a beach at the southwestern edge of the Dominican Republic that appears on every list of the most beautiful in the Caribbean: eight kilometers of white sand and turquoise water, without a single building, without an umbrella, without anything. It's called Bahía de las Águilas, and to get there you have to cross half the country, an arid area of cacti and salt flats right against the border with Haiti. That such a paradise remains unspoiled is no coincidence: it's the fruit of centuries of isolation, of a history of borderland, bauxite mines and national parks that kept Pedernales far from mass tourism. This is the story of how the country's most remote and forgotten corner ended up keeping its greatest natural treasure.
The far southwest of Hispaniola, where Pedernales now sits, was inhabited in pre-Columbian times by the Taíno, who left traces in caves, petroglyphs and shell middens scattered along the coast and the Sierra de Bahoruco. The region belonged to the chiefdom of Jaragua, one of the great Taíno domains of the island, ruled by figures like Bohechío and the famous cacica Anacaona, remembered for her tragic end at the hands of the Spanish colonizers in the early 16th century.
After the conquest, this arid, mountainous area, far from the colonial centers of power, remained a marginal, sparsely populated land. Its isolation, however, made it a refuge: the Sierra de Bahoruco was the bastion from which the cacique Enriquillo sustained his rebellion against the Spanish in the 1520s, before making peace with the Crown. Later, those same rugged mountains would serve as shelter for maroons —escaped enslaved people— who formed free communities.
The name Pedernales refers to the presence of flint stones (sílex) in the area, associated with the stone tool used by the ancient peoples. That simple place name holds the long memory of a border territory, rugged and hard to reach, that for centuries lived with its back to the great events of the island, keeping its remote character.
Pedernales owes much of its identity to its status as a borderland. The island of Hispaniola was divided from the late 17th century between the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo, to the east, and the French one of Saint-Domingue, to the west, which after its independence would become Haiti. The precise demarcation of that border was for centuries a cause of disputes, occupations and negotiations between both sides of the island.
At the far southwest, the Pedernales River ended up marking the international boundary. The definitive fixing of the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti was settled in 20th-century treaties, particularly in the 1930s. The city of Pedernales thus grew against the border line, facing the Haitian town of Anse-à-Pitres, with which it has since maintained an intense commercial and human exchange.
That border coexistence is expressed today in the binational market, where merchants from both countries exchange products on certain days, and in a mixed culture marked by the daily contact between Dominicans and Haitians. The history of the border, not without painful episodes in the relations between the two countries, is an essential key to understanding the life and character of Pedernales.
For much of its history, Pedernales was a secluded and sparsely populated corner. The great boost to the modern city came in the mid-20th century with the exploitation of bauxite —the ore from which aluminum is obtained— in the Cabo Rojo area and the range. From the 1950s, an American mining company established operations in the region, opening mines, building infrastructure and a port to ship out the ore.
Mining transformed the local economy: it attracted workers, provided employment and energized the city of Pedernales, which grew under the shelter of the activity. The Cabo Rojo port became the outlet for the ore to the outside world. However, like any economy dependent on a single resource, it was vulnerable: over time the exploitation was reduced and ceased, leaving behind the facilities and the region seeking new sources of livelihood.
The end of the bauxite cycle coincided with the growing awareness of the area's enormous natural value. Pedernales then began to look toward ecotourism as an alternative, drawing on its national parks and jewels like Bahía de las Águilas. Today, the former mining province bets on nature tourism —with development projects in Cabo Rojo— that tries to combine economic use with the conservation of one of the richest natural heritages in the country.
Pedernales's great treasure is its nature. The province concentrates some of the most valuable protected areas in the Caribbean, structured around two great national parks: Jaragua, on the coastal plain and the shoreline, and Sierra de Bahoruco, in the mountains. Together they protect an astonishing variety of ecosystems, from unspoiled beaches and coastal lagoons to dry forests, cloud forests and high-altitude pine forests.
Jaragua National Park is the largest in the country and shelters Bahía de las Águilas, the Oviedo lagoon, the islands of Beata and Alto Velo, and populations of sea turtles, iguanas and aquatic birds like flamingos. Sierra de Bahoruco National Park, for its part, is a biodiversity hotspot: it's home to most of the birds endemic to Hispaniola and hundreds of orchid species, which makes it a world destination for naturalists and birdwatchers.
The ensemble of these parks, together with the Lake Enriquillo area, was recognized by UNESCO as the Jaragua-Bahoruco-Enriquillo Biosphere Reserve, a seal that underscores its international ecological importance. This natural heritage is today Pedernales's main bet for the future: the engine of an ecotourism that seeks to preserve, while also showcasing, one of the wildest and most beautiful corners of the Caribbean.
For decades, Pedernales's remoteness was its economic curse and, at the same time, the salvation of its nature. That began to change rapidly in the 2020s, when the Dominican state launched in Cabo Rojo the largest tourism project in its recent history: an ambitious development plan valued at more than 2.2 billion dollars, conceived to turn the forgotten southwest into a new Caribbean-scale tourist hub.
The plan envisions thousands of hotel rooms —with international chains like Hilton, Marriott, Iberostar or Wyndham—, a marina, a seafront promenade and all the water, electricity and road infrastructure needed to receive millions of visitors. Its key piece is the new Cabo Rojo International Airport (code CBJ), built with a runway of more than three kilometers capable of receiving large aircraft, with which the government seeks to bring closer by air a destination that until now was six or seven hours by road from Santo Domingo. The project's first hotels began to open around 2025.
The mega-project opens a deep debate about the future of Pedernales. Its defenders present it as a historic opportunity for one of the country's poorest provinces, capable of generating employment and development where before there was only exhausted mining and isolation. But environmental organizations, like Grupo Jaragua, and many residents warn of the risks: the development's closeness to Jaragua National Park and the Cabo Rojo reefs, the pressure on a fragile and arid ecosystem with scarce water, and the doubts about the compensation for the affected communities. The dilemma is the same that much of the Caribbean faces, but here it plays out on one of the last unspoiled coastlines in the region: how to develop without destroying what makes the place unique. How that tension is resolved determines whether Bahía de las Águilas will remain, for the coming generations, that eight-kilometer beach without a single building.