DK Travel : Dominican Republic : History & Culture

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Parque Submarino La Caleta

Best known for its diving among offshore wrecks, this park also contains an excavated Taino cemetery, discovered on the beach in the 1970s. A display of skeletons reveals that indigenous communities preferred to bury their dead in a crouched fetal position, in anticipation, apparently, of being reborn.
Peñon Gordo, Bayahibe

Part of the Parque Nacional del Este, this cave system has some of the country’s best-preserved Taino images on rock panels. A guardian figure, with large head and raised arms, watches over the low entrance of the first cave.
Petroglyphs

The carvings of human faces, animals, and abstract forms scratched onto rock, often in caves.
Pictographs

Drawings, usually made with charcoal against a pale rockface, showing everyday and spiritual imagery.
Santa Bárbara, Santo Domingo

The uncertain nature of colonial life is dramatically reflected by this asymmetrical church-cum-fort, dedicated to the patron saint of soldiers and explosives. The church was vandalized by Sir Francis Drake’s pirates in 1586, and later damaged by a hurricane.
Sir Francis Drake (1540–1596)

Hated in the Spanish world as a Protestant bigot.
Tobacco

The Taino revenge on the Western world: the addictive and dangerous habit of smoking tabaco .
Trujillo (1891–1961)

The nastiest dictator of them all ordered the massacre of 15,000 Haitians in 1937.
Ulíses Heureaux (1845–1899)

Dictator (1882–1899), who tried to sell the Germans a naval station in Samaná.
Zemis

Idols or fetishes representing the many spirits, ancestral and natural, which the Tainos devoutly and religiously worshipped.