When paradise opens its doors wide, it soon ceases to be paradise.
Samaná is an Eden whose doors remain ajar
.
A world apart, yet.
An oblong peninsula at the eastern tip of the
Dominican Republic
.
An appendix that shelters an overflowing microcosm of coconut trees 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 emergencies of the day. day.
In short, a remote place where winter is spent in a swimsuit.
This redoubt largely maintains its purity thanks to its own geographical casing: 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 an all-inclusive bracelet.
Getting to Samaná has
a bit of an adventure
.
You have to cross extensive rice fields flooded by the Yuna River, villages that are just a string of tobacco on the side of the road, plus some bohíos (huts) with their meager conuco (orchard) and their chickens.
Yellow buses, from the American school, are collecting Haitians who have found work in a hotel or batey (farm) in this, for them, the Promised Land.
Huge billboards enliven his hope: “Jehovah provides”, “Christ is coming”, “I knocked and Jesus opened the door for me”…
Guide
Travelers do not need to provide a negative PCR test upon arrival in the Dominican Republic.
The Ministry of Tourism offers a free travel assistance plan until March 31.
The insurance covers all types of medical emergencies, including those caused by a possible contagion of covid (mitur.gob.do; godominicanrepublic.com/es/prensa/coronavirus/)
Tourist Office of the Dominican Republic: godominicanrepublic.com
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 country's definitive independence in 1844.
Some
say that the town was founded by a friend of the
famous buccaneer Roberto Cofresí
, but surely there were already some peaceful fishermen before.
Because the town - if a population of about 26,000 inhabitants can be called that - lives above all from fishing.
What's more, it proudly proclaims itself the shrimp capital, for its famous prawns throughout the country, and has been celebrating a
Ripiao Seafood Festival for
years
that finds an echo in the island tabloids.
One can see and talk with 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 ugly by the
tide of dirt that seems embedded in the landscape
, a problem that unfortunately affects other parts of Samaná.
Arriving in Santa Bárbara de Samaná, or simply Samaná, as they call the capital of the province and peninsula with the same name for short, is quite a
shock
.
The city - yes, 50,000 residents - overlooks an
immense bay, nestled in hills of lush greenery
, with colorful houses lined up along the promenade.
Laughing Caribbean, in its purest form.
Although it may not seem 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, should not bring back fond memories for the Spaniards: this was one of the few places where the first discoverers were received in a hostile way by the Indians;
That is why they named the bay as
Golfo de las Flechas
.
When walking through the streets today, one encounters only smiles and an almost absolute majority of people with black skin:
Samaná is a
melting pot
, which includes descendants of Spanish slaves, Catholics themselves;
descendants of French slaves, who retain their own
Samanés
patois
(dialect);
a third diverse group are the so-called
cocolos
, that is, maroons and freedmen from the Antilles;
and a fourth group with a very special history, the blacks from the United States. And it is that in 1824 Jean-Pierre Boyer, governor of the island (which was then called all of it Haiti), sent citizen Granville to America to bring to descendants of Africans who wanted to benefit from the benefits that would be granted 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 long American surnames (Benjamin, Shephard, King, Anderson, Green ...).
Colorful houses in Santa Bárbara de Samaná.
FRANCIS RAMÍREZ ALAMY
By the Malecón
In 1901, Wesleyan missionaries brought to that community, from England, a wooden church that they assembled here board by board.
Is the
Churcha
(of the English
church
, church), the oldest building in Santa Barbara de Samana.
It presides, 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 reminds of
Teodoro Chassériau
;
This character was born in the nearby town of
El Limón
, was a disciple of Ingres and a prolific painter of French Romanticism, whose work is exhibited in the Louvre and the Orsay Museum in Paris.
There is talk of making him a museum here or something similar, but the truth is that he was taken to the French capital when he was just over a year old.
The Malecón is ideal to take 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 of 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
erected by President Balaguer in 1975, following historical plans by Napoleon's brother-in-law, General Leclerc, who was in fact planning a military fort.
enlarge photo An artist in the city of Las Terrenas.
IAN CUMMING TOURISM DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
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
Chinese restaurant
(despite its name).
There is a slope always full of cars parked on the side of the road: there are people who even come from far away to buy in
D'Vieja Pan
.
The old woman was Albertina de Peña, who died in 2018 as reported by some local media, a descendant of those black Americans and heir to recipes such as
Johnny Cake
(a flatbread made of cornmeal) or
coconut, yautía, sweet potato or cassava
.
The business is now run by his children and grandchildren, the first to affirm that buying at D'Vieja is like acquiring the crumb itself from Samaná.
But the most exciting thing about the place is, without a doubt, the bay.
Immense, luminous, dotted with beaches and keys to whose inlets the raids and misdeeds of Cofresí reached, perhaps also his 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 defected from the English Navy in 1684 with a ship of 40 guns and 100 men, and acted 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 is today the family beach of Santa Bárbara, with a couple of hotels and beach bars as appreciated as
Ballena Blanca
, where you can eat 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 glove, hanged and dismembered.
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 on the entire peninsula, with a magnificent marina and priceless sunsets.
A cave in the National Park of Los Haitises.
I. CUMMING TOURISM DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
The star excursion
From the docks of Samaná, boat or catamaran excursions are organized to
observe whales in the Sanctuary of Marine Mammals
that extends a few miles off the southern 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 cows that the first-time and horny explorers of these seas mistook for mermaids.
At the start of the Malecón there is a discreet Museum of the Whales, to improve the grade.
But the star and obligatory excursion is to
the Los Haitises National Park
.
An amphibious geography that is somewhat reminiscent of Halong Bay, in Vietnam: a patchwork of keys and mogotes, with plumes crowded with vegetation, seabirds and raptors, and gloomy labyrinths of mangroves closing the passage of pipes and arms of the sea.
The term Haitises apparently comes from the Arawak
Ayiti
word
,
"land of mountains."
The Arawaks that Columbus and his colleagues discovered in these lands were called Tainos.
The Tainos 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 caverns 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 most.
They traced them using
whale
or
manatee
blubber
mixed with ash or red mangrove or achiote powder.
In some caves they took advantage of the rock projections to carve masks that, like the paintings,
blend human features with those of birds
like the owl.
The Tainos contributed words to Spanish such as hammock, canoe, barbecue, perhaps also tobacco.
A humpback whale in the bay of Samaná.
KORZUN getty images KIT
Catalog of beaches and chiringuitos
The other important city on the Samaná peninsula is
Las Terrenas
.
That now.
In times of the dictator
Rafael Trujillo
(1930-1961) it was a fishing village;
its access tracks, made of clay, were paved in the 1980s, and electricity did not arrive until 1994. No one would say so 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, kindergartens, small hotels and bistros, a shop with pretensions of a
boutique
... And above all,
grocery stores that bring bleeding meats and fish to the sidewalks
, or a cornucopia of tropical vegetables and fruits, whose simple Enumeration sounds like Neruda's verse: mangoes, guavas, chili peppers, yams, squash, chinolas, custard apples, medlars ... The one that 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 places enjoy special prestige among locals and foreigners, such as
El Mosquito
,
El Cayuco
(run by a Spaniard),
La Yuca Caliente
,
Chez Sandro
... The Las Terrenas seafront covers more than 20 kilometers and includes some of the best Samaná beaches, such as the
beach and bay of Cosón
,
Playa Bonita
(where you can surf),
Las Ballenas
... The best are the farthest to the east, close to the town of El Valle and the
natural park of Cabo Cabrón
.
enlarge photo El Salto El Limón.
MARIA GRAZIA CASELLA ALAMY
An obligatory excursion, from Las Terrenas or any other point in Samaná, is to
El Limón Falls
, classified as a natural monument.
To access it, you must 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 on somewhat dangerous slopes.
But is it worth it.
The main waterfall falls over a pool where it is possible to bathe and recover from the scare of the road.
Two smaller waterfalls are located above and below the main waterfall, in a
tangled and vaporous vegetal decoration, of a fairy tale
.
Some of the stops offer packages that finish off the excursion with a homemade lunch.
Another similar waterfall is found on the route from Samaná to El Valle.
It is the
Lulu waterfall
, which powers its pull with a zip line.
This is a more rural area, in which so-called
ecolodges
are lavish
, such as the
Dominican Tree House Village
or the
Tropical Chalet
.
From the El Valle jetty, it takes just a quarter of an hour by boat to reach
Ermitaño beach
, for some the best in all of Samaná.
Frontón beach, in the Las Galeras area.
JANE SWEENEY AWL
On the eastern tip of the peninsula, at Cape Samaná,
Las Galeras
is another former fishing village that is becoming a cosmopolitan tourist emporium.
Many foreigners choose this area to settle without a return ticket.
From here, it takes a few minutes by boat to get to
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 places, 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 seclude themselves in the luxurious
all-inclusive
resorts
that line the southern coast of the island, east of the capital, Santo Domingo.
Names such as La Romana, Punta Cana or Bávaro occupy a prominent place in tourist brochures and in the dreams of sun and beach seekers among heavenly palm trees.
La Romana
is the closest nucleus to Santo Domingo.
It housed the largest sugar mill in the world, that is what it lived on, but in 1970 it decided to open itself up to tourism by creating a golf course.
Four years later,
Casa de Campo
was built
, a
resort
that at the end of the eighties changed hands 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 consolidated as one of the island's dream destinations.
A scarce 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 only 24 years old at the time, and with visionary fervor they acquired land that they immediately christened like Punta Cana. The following year they opened their first hotel,
Punta Cana Club
, with only 20 rooms, but with a small airstrip.
This would become an international airport in 1986, with the arrival of a first flight from Puerto Rico with 21 passengers.
Today more than
four million tourists
arrive at this airport a
year
.
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 at first a semi-wild territory in which the employees of Punta Cana stayed. 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, together with Punta Cana and La Romana, into a winning trio of aces for tourism in the Dominican Republic.
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