🇩🇴 Dominican Republic · East coast and Punta Cana
Uvero Alto is the quietest and most reserved corner of the Punta Cana area: a long strip of golden-sand beaches and palm trees, northeast of Bávaro, where tourist development is concentrated in all-inclusive resorts surrounded by nature, far from the hustle of the busier core. It's the ideal destination for anyone looking for the Caribbean in a restful key, with kilometers of open beach, warm sea and the feeling of being somewhere more remote and serene.
Unlike Bávaro, with its wide offering of shops, bars and nightlife, Uvero Alto bets on calm. Its beaches, somewhat rougher in certain stretches because they're more exposed to the Atlantic, give you spectacular sunrises and serene sunsets. It's a perfect base for combining days of hammock, pool and sea with getaways to the great icons of the east: Saona Island, the cenotes and adventure parks, and the colonial history of Santo Domingo, all reachable on day trips.
This guide covers Uvero Alto with a practical eye: what its beach is like, what excursions leave from here, how to get around the area and how to arrive from Punta Cana airport. If you're after a relaxed Caribbean holiday, with the comfort of all-inclusive and the option of seeing Dominican nature and culture a step away, Uvero Alto is a sound choice.
Uvero Alto isn't a city with colonial history, but a coastal area of La Altagracia province that only developed in recent decades, within the great tourist boom of the Dominican east. Before the Europeans, the whole eastern end of the island of Hispaniola was part of the Taíno chiefdom of Higüey, one of the five great domains into which the island was divided when Christopher Columbus arrived in 1492. After the Spanish conquest, this eastern shoreline remained practically unpopulated for centuries, given over to livestock, fishing and coconuts, far from the centers of power in Santo Domingo. The name 'Uvero' refers to the uvero or sea grape (Coccoloba uvifera), a typical Caribbean coastal tree that grows beside sandy beaches. The great change came with the opening of the Punta Cana complex and, above all, of its international airport (1984), which opened the region to mass tourism. While Bávaro and Punta Cana were urbanized at great speed, Uvero Alto, farther north and reached later, gradually filled with all-inclusive resorts from the 2000s on, keeping a quieter and more natural profile. Today it's one of the east's rest hubs, valued precisely for its calm. The deeper history of the region, the Taíno, the conquest and the origin of Higüey as a religious center, is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The far eastern tip of the country: Punta Cana, Bávaro and Cap Cana, the most famous resort strip in the Caribbean, alongside Higüey, the nation's religious capital, Bayahíbe and Saona Island in Cotubanamá National Park.
Read the history of La Altagracia →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The eastern end of the island of Hispaniola, where Uvero Alto stands today, was inhabited before the Europeans arrived by the Taíno, the people of Arawak origin who dominated the Antilles. The island was divided, according to the Spanish chronicles, into five great cacicazgos or domains, and the whole east corresponded to the chiefdom of Higüey (also called Iguey or Higuayagua), one of the largest, governed by figures like the cacique Cayacoa, the cacica Higüanamá and the cacique Cotubanamá.
The Taíno of this region lived from fishing, gathering fruit and shellfish, hunting birds and hutias and growing cassava or manioc, from which they made casabe. They were skilled navigators in their canoes and knew this shoreline of beaches, palm groves and dry forest thoroughly. The coasts and the coconut palms that are today the tourist draw of Uvero Alto were part of their everyday territory, a landscape from which they drew food and resources.
The name 'Uvero' itself refers to the nature of these coasts: it alludes to the uvero or sea grape (Coccoloba uvifera), a typical Caribbean coastal tree, with round leaves and clusters of edible fruit resembling grapes, that grows beside sandy beaches. It's a name that speaks of the area's natural landscape, long predating any development, and that connects the place with its original botanical setting.
After the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492 and the founding of Santo Domingo in 1498, the first permanent European city on the American continent, the Spanish gradually subdued the chiefdoms of Hispaniola. The one in Higüey, in the east, was among the last to fall: there were Taíno uprisings at the start of the 16th century, harshly repressed, and the original population was decimated within a few decades by war, forced labor and, above all, European diseases.
With the gold exhausted and the Crown's attention turned toward Mexico and Peru, Hispaniola entered a long decline. The east of the island, far from Santo Domingo and without mineral resources, remained a marginal region given over to extensive livestock farming, fishing and the use of coconut and timber. For centuries, this shoreline, including the Uvero Alto area, remained practically unpopulated, covered in dry forest, palm groves and unspoiled beaches that almost no one reached.
That isolation, which for so long meant poverty and neglect, was paradoxically what preserved the east's natural landscapes intact. The sandy beaches, the warm waters and the coconut palms that draw travelers today reached the 20th century almost unaltered, precisely because the region had been left out of development throughout the colonial era and much of the republican one.
The great turn in the history of the Dominican east came in the second half of the 20th century, with the discovery of its tourist potential. In 1969, a group of investors, among them the US businessman Theodore (Ted) Kheel and the Dominican Frank Rainieri, acquired large stretches of untouched land in the Punta Cana area, then reachable only by dirt tracks and without services. There, in the 1970s, the region's first tourist complex was born, the seed of what is today one of the most important holiday hubs in the Caribbean.
The decisive milestone was the construction of Punta Cana International Airport, inaugurated in 1984. It was a pioneering work: the first privately managed and owned international airport in the world, with a rustic-style terminal, cana (thatch) roofs and architecture integrated into the tropical setting. That airport solved the main obstacle, access, and opened the door to the mass arrival of tourists directly to the eastern beaches.
From then on, the coastal strip between Punta Cana and Bávaro was transformed at a dizzying pace, with all-inclusive resorts, golf courses and real estate developments. The Dominican Republic came to receive millions of visitors a year, most of them through PUJ airport, and the east established itself as the country's tourist engine.
While Bávaro and Punta Cana were being urbanized at great speed from the 1980s and 1990s, Uvero Alto, farther north and reached later, stayed for a time outside the front of tourist expansion. That delay resulted, in the long run, in an identity of its own: the area developed later and in a more spread-out way, keeping a quieter, more natural and less built-up profile than the main core.
It was above all from the 2000s that Uvero Alto began filling with large all-inclusive resorts, many of them from international chains, making the most of its long golden-sand beaches and its still barely touched setting. The bet was different from Bávaro's: instead of a density of shops, bars and nightlife, Uvero Alto positioned itself as a destination of rest, calm and disconnection, designed for couples and families looking for beach and relaxation without the hustle of the tourist heart.
Today Uvero Alto is one of the relaxation hubs of the Dominican east, valued precisely for what was for so long its 'disadvantage': being more remote. Its story, like that of Cap Cana, is one of an unspoiled coastal landscape that within a few decades became part of the great Punta Cana destination, but kept a more human scale and a closer relationship with the nature around it.
Beyond its short tourist history, Uvero Alto sits within a natural setting of great richness that is, in itself, part of its identity. The whole east coast of Hispaniola is formed of coral limestone and karst terrain that water has shaped over thousands of years, creating caves, caverns and the characteristic cenotes: freshwater pools and lagoons that surface from underground and that today are attractions like Hoyo Azul, farther south, in the Cap Cana area.
The area's landscape combines sandy beaches, coconut groves, tropical dry forest and, out to sea, coral reefs that harbor rich marine life. That nature is the basis of much of the east's tourist experiences: snorkeling and diving on the reefs, buggy excursions through the countryside and the crops (cane, coffee, cacao, tobacco) and swims in cenotes and lagoons.
Facing these coasts, within the same natural context, stretches Cotubanamá National Park (formerly Parque Nacional del Este), which protects the famous Saona Island and a valuable ecosystem of beaches, mangroves and reefs, as well as caves with Taíno art. That coexistence between a modern tourist destination and an ancient, well-preserved natural setting is what gives Uvero Alto and the whole region its character: behind the resorts and the pools, the deep geography of the Dominican east keeps beating.