Long before there were resorts and airports, the far east of the island of Hispaniola —today La Altagracia province— was a territory of Taíno, virgin coasts and scrubland. The island, which the Taíno called Quisqueya or Haiti, was populated by this Arawak-speaking people organized into chiefdoms. The eastern region was part of the chiefdom of Higüey, ruled by the cacique Cotubanamá (or Cayacoa, according to the sources), whose name is now borne by the national park that protects Saona Island and much of this coast.
The Taíno of the east lived from fishing, gathering, hunting and the cultivation of cassava, corn and other crops, in villages near the sea and the rivers. The area, with its beaches, its mangroves, its caves and its cenotes, was for them a rich and familiar territory. The caves of the region —like those of Cotubanamá National Park— preserve Taíno pictographs and petroglyphs, evidence of their presence and their worldview.
After the arrival of the Spanish at the end of the 15th century, the chiefdom of Higüey was one of the last to fall under colonial rule, following harsh clashes in the early 16th century. With the collapse of the Taíno population and the shift of the colonial axis toward other regions, the Dominican east remained for centuries a rural, cattle-raising and sparsely populated area, hard to reach, devoted to livestock, logging and coconut palms, far from the bustle of the capital. That remoteness and that wild character lasted well into the 20th century, when everything would begin to change.
Throughout the colonial centuries, while the coast that is now Punta Cana remained practically uninhabited, the center of life in the Dominican east was the town of Salvaleón de Higüey, founded by the Spanish in the early 16th century. Higüey became the region's seat and, above all, the great center of Marian devotion for the whole island thanks to the Virgin of Altagracia.
According to tradition, an image of the Virgin of Altagracia arrived in Higüey in the hands of some Spanish brothers in the early 16th century, and soon became the object of intense popular devotion. Over time, the Virgin of Altagracia was transformed into the 'spiritual mother' of the Dominican people, their protective patroness, and Higüey into the country's main pilgrimage center. The old church of San Dionisio, of colonial origin, was for centuries the sanctuary that guarded the image.
This devotion explains why Higüey, and not the coast, was the true historic heart of the region for five hundred years. The entire province bears the name of La Altagracia in honor of the Virgin. Already in the 20th century, in 1971, the current Basilica of Our Lady of Altagracia was inaugurated, an imposing modern temple that receives hundreds of thousands of pilgrims every January 21. While the faith was concentrated in Higüey, the neighboring beaches were still barely coconut palms and sand: no one yet imagined that this forgotten coast would become, a few decades later, one of the most famous tourist destinations in the world.
The story of Punta Cana as we know it begins in the late 1960s. Until then, this strip of the east coast was a remote area, with no paved roads or electricity, reached only with difficulty and where there were only coconut palms, scrubland and virgin beaches. The transformation began when a group of investors —among them the American businessman Theodore (Ted) Kheel and the Dominican Frank Rainieri, pioneering figures of the project— bet on developing the area for tourism, around 1969-1971, acquiring vast tracts of that then almost worthless coast.
The beginnings were hard: practically everything had to be built from scratch, opening roads in the jungle and bringing services to an isolated place. But the bet had a solid basis: beaches of extraordinary beauty, turquoise sea and sun almost all year, exactly what international sun-and-beach tourism was starting to demand. The first tourist complexes in the area emerged, and little by little Punta Cana gained a reputation.
A decisive milestone was the construction of Punta Cana International Airport, opened in 1984. It was one of the first privately run international airports in the world, and its terminal, with palm-thatch (cana) roofs and a tropical style, became a distinctive mark of the destination. By allowing the arrival of direct flights from abroad, without passing through Santo Domingo, the airport changed the rules of the game: it brought Punta Cana closer to the world and laid the foundations for the boom that would come in the following decades.
From the 1990s, and with more force in the 2000s, Punta Cana and the neighboring beach of Bávaro experienced a true tourism explosion. Big international and national hotel chains —especially Spanish companies— built enormous all-inclusive resorts along this coast, with hundreds and even thousands of rooms, pools, buffets, shows and activities. The all-inclusive model facing paradisiacal beaches proved a resounding success and turned Punta Cana into a synonym for accessible, hassle-free Caribbean holidays.
The growth was dizzying. The area went from a few complexes to concentrating the country's largest hotel capacity and receiving millions of tourists a year, arriving above all from the United States, Canada, Europe and South America. Tourism became one of the main engines of the Dominican economy, and Punta Cana its flagship: today it's one of the most visited destinations in the whole Caribbean.
That accelerated development also brought challenges: the pressure on the environment, the management of water and waste, the contrast between the wealth of the resorts and the conditions of the neighboring towns where much of the workforce lives, and, more recently, phenomena like the arrival of sargassum on the beaches. The area has been adding more luxurious projects (like Cap Cana, with its marina and its golf courses) and betting on diversifying the offering beyond the classic all-inclusive. What was, half a century ago, a coast of coconut palms without roads is today one of the great tourism capitals of the Caribbean.
Despite the intense tourist urbanization of the coast, the Dominican east preserves protected natural treasures of enormous value. The most important is Cotubanamá National Park (long known as Parque Nacional del Este), a vast protected area at the far southeast of the country that takes in dry and humid forests, coasts, mangroves, caves with Taíno rock art and the famous Saona Island.
Saona Island, within the park, is the jewel of the area: an island of virgin beaches, coconut palms and turquoise waters, habitat of seabirds, turtles and manatees, and the setting of the famous 'natural pool' visited daily by excursions. Its status as a national park has allowed much of its original beauty to be preserved, though mass tourism poses management challenges that the authorities try to balance.
The park also protects an important archaeological heritage: numerous caves, like the José María Cave or the Puente Cave, preserve hundreds of Taíno pictographs and petroglyphs, one of the most significant rock-art ensembles in the Caribbean. These sites are a reminder that, long before the resorts, this land belonged to the Taíno. The conservation of Cotubanamá, its mangroves, its reefs and its marine fauna is key not only for the environment but also for the very future of nature tourism in the region, which increasingly values these spaces over the exclusive sun-and-beach model.