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The Rough Guide to the Dominican Republic 4 (Rough Guide Travel Guides) PDF

420 Pages·2008·22.21 MB·English
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What traditionally attracts visitors are the parts of the country that resemble the image of a Caribbean playland, the crystal-clear waters and sandy beaches lined with palm trees, of which the DR has plenty. This vision of leisurely days spent by the sea and romantic nights filled with merengue and dark rum is supported by the largest all- inclusive resort industry in the world; if you’re looking to pay a set rate for airfare, hotel, food and drinks – and have a carefree Caribbean vacation behind the protection of a fenced-off compound – you can’t do much better than here. Such a “perfect” vacation, however, would mean missing out on much of what makes the country so s pecial. Set on the most geographically diverse Caribbean island, the Dominican Republic boasts alpine wilder- ness, tropical rainforests and mangrove swamps, cultivated savannas, vast desert expanses and everything in between within its relatively small confnes – slightly smaller than the US states of New Hampshire and Vermont combined. The opportunities for eco-tourism and adventure travel are staggering: if you were so inclined, in a single week you could scale a 150-metre waterfall on a rope, mountain bike along remote dirt tracks, ride the best windsurfng waves in the hemisphere, trek to the 6 top of a 3000-metre mountain, and head out in a fshing boat to see dozens of humpback whales crashing about a scenic bay. | INTRODUCTION | WHERE TO GO | WHEN TO GO The Dominican Republic also Fact file lays claim to some of the more intriguing culture and history in • The Dominican Republic shares the area, dating back to its ear ly the island of Hispaniola with the cave-dwellin g groups, the Tainos, Republic of Haiti. Its 48, 734 square kilometres encompass tropical who recorded much of their activ- rainforests, soarin g mountain ities in the form of rock art – it’s ranges, mangrove swamps and quite possible you’ll fnd yourself several hundred kilometres of clambering through a cave to view Caribbean coast . some of these preserved paintings • Despite the existence of large during your stay. In addition, as stretches of wilderness, the Dominican Republic is a densely Dominicans are often quick to populated nation, with close to nine point out, their land was the setting million residents. for Christopher Columbus’s frst • Ethnically, the population is colony, La Isabela, and Spain’s frst of mixed African and European New World city, Santo Domin go, ancestry. The Tainos who inha b- at the end of the ffteenth century. ited the island before Columbus Though the island quickly lost were mostly wiped out, but some limited Taino ancestry still does this foothold, the events that took exist within the Dominican people place during its brief heyday did today. Individuals of mixed African much to defne the Americas as and European descent are typically we know them, an d examples referred to as Indio, in part to of period architecture – both obscure their African heritage. preserved and in ruins – remain • Until the 1980s, the Dominican economy was centred almost exclu- scattered across the countr y, most sively around agriculture, including notably in the colonial heart of export crops like sugar and tobacco. Santo Domingo, today the nation’s Today, however, agricultural exports capital and centre of industry. are dwarfed by tourism and free zone During the intervening centu - manufacturing, which each bring in approximately $2 billion annually. ries the Dominican people have endured much hardship – intermi- • Around ninety percent of Domini- cans identify themselves as Roman nable civil strife in the nineteenth Catholics, though the great majority of these do not activel y participate in the Catholic church. Some Dominicans, particularl y in rural areas and the poorer barrios within the cities, practice vodú dominicana, a syncretic religion that combines Catholicism with African spiritual practices, and an ever-increasing minority have converted to various denominations 7 of evangelical Protestantism . | INTRODUCTION | WHERE TO GO | WHEN TO GO 왖 Sign in Las Terrenas The Zone The Dominican Republic boasts the hemisphere’s oldest European ruins from the era of conquistadors. The most impressive relics are contained within Santo Domingo’s compact Zona Colonial – known by the growing community of expats who live here as simply “The Zone”. Contained within the Zone’s old crumbling city walls are the hem- isphere’s first university, cathedral, monastery, hospital, nunnery and more, including the 500-year-old palace of the Columbus family. Wandering past one colonial relic after another can certainly transport you back to the time when Santo Domingo was Spain’s one tentative toehold in what was known then as the Cannibal Sea, but the thousands of people who live and work in these buildings make it more than just an atmospheric outdoor museum. By day old men smoke cigars and argue politics in the park, sharp-dressed businesspeople hustle to bank jobs and vendors sell split coconuts from horse-drawn carts. At night the narrow streets are lined with outdoor cafés and restaurants, local families shoot the breeze (and pass the bottle) from front stoops and the city’s young and wealthy hit the neighbourhood clubs – among the hottest in the city. It would be easy to get lost here for your entire stay, without lon ging for the beach. Our comprehensive coverage of the city centre begins on p.62. century, an oppressive dictatorship in the twentieth, intermittent occupation by Haiti, Spain and the United States, and a boom-and-bust economy centred frst on tobacco, later on sugar, that never allowed the country to stand on frm economic footing. Even today, the DR remains a nation in transition. Depsite its enviable all-inclusive tourism industry, eighty percent of its people live in poverty. Santo Domingo has grown into a heaving industrial metropolis, fve times larger than the next biggest city, and much of the rest of the countyr is made up of rural tobacco towns or tiny fshing villages often held at the mercy of tropical rainstorms, hurricanes and occasional power outages. The Dominican people have dealt with these tough circumstances in ever-resourceful ways: extended families maintain close ties and pool their assets, most village homes are built one brick at a time (sometimes 8 taking two generations to complete), and informal shoestring transporta- tion systems connect nearly every city and village in the country. Another | INTRODUCTION | WHERE TO GO | WHEN TO GO

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