When paradise opens its doors wide, it soon ceases to be a paradise. Samaná is an Eden whose doors remain ajar. A world apart, still. An oblong peninsula at the eastern end of the Dominican Republic. Appendix that shelters an overflowing microcosm of coconut palms and plantations, virgin beaches, mangroves, keys and islets where neither the echo of legendary pirates nor the timid approach of tourists alter the routine of fishermen and shopkeepers who open their grocery stores to the urgencies of the day to day. A hidden place, in short, where winter is spent in a bathing suit.
This redoubt largely maintains its purity thanks to its own geographical structure: the eastern mountain range of the island and the shield of beaches and resorts of Punta Cana and Bávaro serve as a sponge to contain the ringed invaders with all-inclusive bracelets. Getting to Samaná is a bit of an adventure. You have to cross extensive rice fields flooded by the Yuna River, villages that are just a string of tabancos on the side of the road, plus some bohíos (huts) with their meager conuco (orchard) and chickens. Yellow buses, from American schools, are collecting Haitians who have found work in some hotel or batey (farm) from this, for them, the Promised Land. Huge billboards fuel their hope: “Jehovah provides”, “Christ is coming”, “I knocked and Jesus opened the door for me”…
The first town, at the gateway to the Samaná peninsula, is called Sánchez. It is the surname of one of the three “fathers of the country” who proclaimed the definitive independence of the country in 1844. Some say that the town was founded by a buddy of the famous buccaneer Roberto Cofresí, but surely there were some peaceful fishermen before. Because the town —if a population of about 26,000 inhabitants can be called that— lives mainly from fishing. What's more, it proudly proclaims itself as the shrimp capital, for its famous prawns in all informacion.center, and has been celebrating a Ripiao Seafood Festival for years that finds an echo in the island's tabloids. One can see and talk to the fishermen who arrive with their loot or mend the nets stalked by greedy pelicans perched on the poles of the boardwalk. It is a pity that this bucolic image is marred by the tide of dirt that seems embedded in the landscape, a problem that unfortunately affects other places in Samaná.
Getting to Santa Bárbara de Samaná, or simply Samaná, as the capital of the homonymous province and peninsula is called for short, is quite a shock. The city —yes, 50,000 residents— overlooks an immense bay, nestled in hills of exuberant greenery, with colored houses lining the promenade. Smiling Caribbean, in its purest form.
Although it may not look like it at all, it is an old city. It was founded in 1756 by the Spanish governor of the island to prevent the incursion of French settlers and, as a curious fact, Canarian families were brought to populate it. The enclave, however, must not have brought good memories to the Spaniards: this was one of the few places where the first discoverers were received in a hostile manner by the Indians; for this reason they baptized the bay as Golfo de las Flechas.
Walking through the streets today, one comes across only smiles and an almost absolute majority of black-skinned people: Samaná is a melting pot, which includes descendants of Spanish slaves, Catholics mostly; descendants of French slaves, who retain their own Samanian patois (dialect); a third motley group are the so-called cocolos, that is, maroons and freedmen from the Antilles; and a fourth group with a very special history, the black people from the United States. In 1824, Jean-Pierre Boyer, governor of the island (which was then called all of it Haiti), sent the citizen Granville to America to bring to descendants of Africans who would like to avail themselves of the benefits that would be granted to them here. Wilfredo Benjamin Kelly, current manager of a local marine excursion agency, boasts of ancestors who were part of those "pilgrim fathers" from Philadelphia. He assures that the group remained united by its Protestant creed and that even today many families retain thirty or so long American surnames (Benjamin, Shephard, King, Anderson, Green...).
Along the Malecon
In 1901, Wesleyan missionaries brought a wooden church to that community from England, which they erected here board by board. It is the Churcha (from the English church, church), the oldest building in Santa Bárbara de Samaná. It presides over, along with another whitewashed and more modern Catholic temple, the so-called Malecón, or Avenida de la Marina. Near the church, in a small park, a statue recalls Teodoro Chassériau; This character was born in the nearby town of El Limón, he was a disciple of Ingres and a prolific painter of French Romanticism, whose work is exhibited at the Louvre and the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. There is talk of building a museum here or something similar, but the truth is that they took it to the French capital when it was just over a year old.
The Malecón is ideal for taking the pulse of Samaná. The so-called Village is a recent invention with brightly colored houses, very Caribbean. Insatiable games of dominoes are played on the terraces or benches along the promenade, in front of the “hidden bridges” that link a couple of islets with the mainland. In reality, it is a very long pedestrian bridge built by President Balaguer in 1975, following historical plans by Napoleon's brother-in-law, General Leclerc, who in fact planned a military fort.
In the bars and restaurants around the Malecón, coconut or coconut sauce is added to almost everything, especially fish. Famous places to try the local cuisine are Tierra y Mar, the Mediterranean Tavern or the restaurant Chino (despite its name). There is a hill always full of cars parked on the side of the road: there are people who even come from afar to buy at D'Vieja Pan. The old one was Albertina de Peña, who died in 2018 as some local media reported, descendant of those black Americans and heir of recipes such as Johnny Cake (a flat corn flour bread) or coconut, yautia, sweet potato or cassava bread. The business is now run by his children and grandchildren, the first to affirm that buying in D'Vieja is like acquiring the very crumb of Samaná.
But the most exciting thing about the place is, without a doubt, the bay. Immense, luminous, dotted with beaches and cays whose inlets were raided and Cofresí's misdeeds arrived, perhaps also its still hidden treasures. The pirate had his lair in neighboring Puerto Rico, where he was executed in 1825 along with 11 cronies. Another rebel without a cause was Captain Joseph Bannister, who deserted the English Navy in 1684 with a ship of 40 guns and 100 men, and served as a privateer from Cayo Levantado (so named in honor of his uprising against the crown).
This islet is located about two miles from the coast and today is the family beach of Santa Bárbara, with a couple of hotels and beach bars as popular as Ballena Blanca, where you can enjoy fish or coconut shrimp, stewed lambí (snail), a barbecue or a seafood casserole, contemplating the beach with the spark that a mamajuana (typical rum punch) always gives. By the way, Bannister ended up getting the gauntlet, hanged and quartered. It also gives its name to The Bannister Hotel, in Puerto Bahía, about six kilometers from the city and one of the best tourist complexes in the entire peninsula, with a magnificent marina and priceless sunsets.
The star tour
Boat or catamaran excursions are organized from the Samaná docks to watch whales in the Marine Mammal Sanctuary that extends a few miles from the south coast. Humpback whales come to mate from January to March, but playful dolphins can be spotted at any time of the year. It is more difficult to see a manatee, that species of sea cow that the first-time and feverish explorers of these seas confused with mermaids. At the start of the Malecón there is a discreet Museum of the Whales, to improve note.
But the star and obligatory excursion is to the Haitises National Park. An amphibious geography that is somewhat reminiscent of Halong Bay, in Vietnam: a jumble of keys and hummocks, with plumes packed with vegetation, seabirds and birds of prey, and gloomy labyrinths of mangroves blocking the passage of pipes and inlets of the sea. The term Haitises apparently comes from the Arawak word ayiti, "land of mountains." The Arawaks that Columbus and his colleagues discovered in these lands were called Tainos. The Taínos left in some of the formidable caves, carved by water and erosion, a series of cave paintings and petroglyphs that tourists now avidly seek in this 1,600 square kilometer park.
Only four of the many caves with paintings or archaeological remains are visited. They are very simple paintings, not as old, of course, as the European ones: these Taíno figures can be between 500 and 1,000 years old at the most. They traced them using whale or manatee fat mixed with red mangrove or achiote ash or powder. In some caves they took advantage of the outcroppings of the rock to carve masks that, like the paintings, fuse human features with those of birds such as the owl. The Taínos contributed to Castilian words such as hammock, canoe, barbecue, perhaps also tobacco.
Catalog of beaches and beach bars
The other important city of the Samaná peninsula is Las Terrenas. At least nowadays. In times of the dictator Rafael Trujillo (1930-1961) it was a fishing village; its access tracks, of beaten earth, were paved in the 1980s, and electricity did not arrive until 1994. Nobody would say it today, in view of the hustle and bustle and the airs of a happy and confident city. There are no tourists here, foreigners become neighbors in a matter of minutes. Banks, schools, nurseries, small hotels and bistros, some shops with boutique pretensions... And above all grocery stores that bring out bleeding meats and fish, or a cornucopia of vegetables and tropical fruits, whose simple This enumeration sounds like a Neruda verse: mangoes, guavas, chili peppers, yams, pumpkins, passion fruit, cherimoyas, medlars... What is still called Pueblo de los Pescadores is the old nucleus that gave rise to the population, converted into a string of beach bars and terraces on the beach. Some of these establishments enjoy special prestige among locals and strangers, such as El Mosquito, El Cayuco (run by a Spaniard), La Yuca Caliente, Chez Sandro... The Las Terrenas marine façade spans more than 20 kilometers and encompasses some of the best Samaná beaches, such as Cosón beach and bay, Bonita beach (where you can surf), Las Ballenas... The best ones are those further away to the east, near the town of El Valle and the Cabo Cabrón natural park.
An obligatory excursion, from Las Terrenas or any other point in Samaná, is to Salto El Limón, cataloged as a natural monument. To access it, it is necessary to equip yourself at one of the 13 ranches or stops that provide a horse, a protective helmet and a guide to undertake the ascents and descents of somewhat dangerous slopes. But is it worth it. The main waterfall plunges into a pool where it is possible to bathe and recover from the shock of the road. Two smaller waterfalls meet above and below the main waterfall, in a tangled and vaporous fairy-tale setting. Some of the stops offer packages that top off the tour with a homemade lunch.
Another similar waterfall is found on the route from Samaná to El Valle. It is the Lulu waterfall, which enhances its pull with a zip line. This is a more rural area, in which the so-called ecolodges are lavished, such as the Dominican Tree House Village or the Chalet Tropical. From the El Valle pier, it takes just a quarter of an hour by boat to reach Ermitaño Beach, for some the best in all of Samaná.
At the eastern tip of the peninsula, at Cape Samaná, Las Galeras is another old fishing village that is becoming a cosmopolitan tourist emporium. Many foreigners choose this area to settle without a return ticket. From here, a few minutes by boat are enough to reach Rincón beach: more than three kilometers of virgin sand with a river in the background, Caño Frío, where you can cool off. Those who come to Rincón Bay bring refreshment places such as El Monte Azul, El Pescador, El Cabito, La Bodeguita… Discreet names and venues, not an open secret. So that the doors remain ajar and paradise never ceases to be.
Chronicle of an announced success
Most of the tourists who travel to the Dominican Republic stay in the luxurious all-inclusive resorts that line the southern coast of the island, east of the capital, Santo Domingo. Names like La Romana, Punta Cana or Bávaro occupy a preferential place in tourist brochures and in the dreams of seekers of sun and sand among paradisiacal palm trees.
La Romana is the closest nucleus to Santo Domingo. It housed the largest sugar mill in the world, that's what it lived on, but in 1970 it decided to open up to tourism by creating a golf course. Four years later, Casa de Campo was built, a resort that changed hands at the end of the eighties and acquired an elitist and seductive stamp by the Dominican designer Óscar de la Renta. In the nineties the first international cruise ships arrived, and a decade later it was consolidated as one of the island's dream destinations.
A scant hour's drive east of La Romana, Punta Cana was pure jungle in 1970. New York lawyer Ted Kheel partnered with Dominican Frank Rainieri, who was just 24 years old at the time, and with visionary fervor they acquired some land that they immediately baptized as Punta Cana. The following year they opened their first hotel, Punta Cana Club, with only 20 rooms, but with a small landing strip. This would become an international airport in 1986, with the arrival of the first flight from Puerto Rico with 21 passengers. Today more than four million tourists a year arrive at that airport. At the end of the nineties, Rainieri managed to associate Óscar de la Renta and Julio Iglesias in the Puntacana Group, which has not stopped growing (although now without the designer or the singer).
To the north, Bávaro was initially a semi-wild territory in which the employees of Punta Cana were housed. But soon Bávaro Beach began to be colonized by large hotel chains, including the Spanish Riu, Meliá, Barceló, Iberostar, etc. that have turned this enclave, along with Punta Cana and La Romana, into a winning trio of aces for tourism in the Dominican Republic.
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Article by Información Center.
