Dominican Republic

🇩🇴 Dominican Republic

La Romana

La Romana is the second-largest city in the Dominican Republic — 280,000 people on the southeastern coast of Hispaniola, 130km east of Santo Domingo, on the Chavón River near its mouth at the Caribbean Sea. La Romana was founded in 1502 as a Spanish colonial settlement and grew through the sugarcane industry (the Central Romana sugar mill, operated by Gulf+Western Industries from 1967, now by the Fanjul family's Casa de Campo resort group, is still one of the largest sugar mills in the Caribbean). The city is best known internationally for two very different things: Casa de Campo (one of the most exclusive resort developments in the Caribbean, covering 7,000 acres with a private airport, three golf courses, polo fields, a marina, and a shooting centre) and Altos de Chavón (a stunning recreation of a 16th-century Italian Mediterranean village built in the 1970s by Dominican craftsmen and designer Roberto Copa on a cliff above the Chavón River gorge — now an arts school, gallery complex, and amphitheatre where Frank Sinatra performed the inaugural concert in 1982). The Isla Catalina (a small uninhabited coral island 2km offshore, with some of the finest snorkelling and swimming water in the Caribbean) and the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de la Altagracia (the most visited religious site in the Dominican Republic, 20km west in Higüey) are the primary day trip destinations. Best months: December–April.

🇩🇴 Dominican Republic

Punta Cana

Punta Cana is the Dominican Republic's primary tourist destination and one of the world's most visited beach resort areas — a 50 km strip of white coral sand beaches on the eastern tip of Hispaniola island with some of the most consistently calm, warm (28°C) and clear turquoise Caribbean water in the Greater Antilles. The resort area (with no functioning city — it is entirely resort infrastructure) receives 8+ million tourists per year, primarily Canadians (the largest single nationality), Americans, Europeans and Latin Americans who come for the all-inclusive resort model that Punta Cana pioneered and perfected — more than 60,000 hotel rooms in all-inclusive resorts clustered along the beaches of Bávaro, Punta Cana, Cap Cana and Uvero Alto, making this the highest density of all-inclusive resort rooms in the Caribbean. The name Punta Cana comes from the cana palm (Sabal causiarum) that grew along this coast before the resort development — the Punta Cana International Airport (opened 1984) is the only privately owned international airport in the world, still owned by the Verton group that built the first resort. Beyond the all-inclusive compounds, the region has: the Saona Island (a uninhabited island national park 90 km south by speedboat, with extraordinary starfish-filled shallow sandbars and the finest snorkelling in the DR), Altos de Chavón (a hand-built replica 16th-century Mediterranean village above the Chavón River, 100 km west, with an 5,000-seat Greek amphitheatre that has hosted Frank Sinatra, Julio Iglesias and modern artists), and the underwater world of the eastern Caribbean including humpback whale watching near the Silver Bank (January-March) accessible from the north coast. The Dominican Republic itself is the most visited country in the Caribbean (8.2 million tourists in 2022) and Punta Cana receives approximately half of that total.

🇩🇴 Dominican Republic

Santo Domingo

Santo Domingo is the capital of the Dominican Republic and the oldest permanently inhabited European city in the Americas — founded in 1496 by Bartholomew Columbus (brother of Christopher) as La Nueva Isabela, renamed Santo Domingo in 1498, making it 526 years old and the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the Western Hemisphere. Santo Domingo (population 3.3 million metropolitan area) was the administrative capital of the Spanish Empire in the Americas for the first decades of colonisation — the Viceroyalty of New Spain was administered from here before the weight of colonial administration shifted to Mexico City; the first university in the Americas (Universidad de Santo Tomás de Aquino, founded 1538, now the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo); the first cathedral in the Americas (Catedral Primada de América, begun 1512, consecrated 1541); and the first stone fortress in the Americas (Fortaleza Ozama, 1502-1508) are all in Santo Domingo. The Zona Colonial (the historic colonial district of Santo Domingo, UNESCO World Heritage since 1990 — 10 square km of the oldest European urban fabric in the Americas, with over 300 colonial buildings from the 16th century, the cobblestone streets, the fortified walls and the imposing Spanish Renaissance and early Baroque architecture) is the primary tourist destination. Santo Domingo is simultaneously a vibrant, complex Caribbean capital with the Dominican merengue music (the national dance of the Dominican Republic, the fastest-tempo partner dance of the Caribbean, with its characteristic hip motion; invented in the Cibao valley north of the capital in the early 19th century), bachata (the heartbreak guitar genre from the rural Dominican Republic that has become one of the most popular Latin music genres globally), the cocina criolla dominicana (the distinctive Dominican cuisine with sancocho — the 7-meat stew — as the national dish), and the Presidente beer culture of the malecon.