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A surprisingly large town lying in a fertile valley to the south of the Cordillera Central, San Juan is a busy agricultural center, surrounded by banana plantations and coffee farms. Its proximity to the Haitian border has brought problems over the centuries as invading armies occupied and destroyed the town. Today’s architecture is modern, but there are also some turn-of-the-19th-century buildings around the Parque Central, where a permanent buzz of outdoor buying and selling makes for an interesting walk.

A city’s whose fortunes have ebbed and flowed with world sugar prices, San Pedro was once the richest place in the country. Some of its Victorian buildings, such as the fire station and the mansions near the Parque Duarte, recall the boom years. But those times have gone – just a memory since San Pedro was battered by Hurricane Georges in 1998. Nowadays, the city produces world-class baseball players, some descended from the English-speaking migrants called cocolos, who settled on the island at the turn of the 19th century.

Traditionally the gateway to the Samaná Peninsula, bustling Sánchez is where all vehicles turn off to cross the mountains over to Las Terrenas. It was an important place when a rail connection linked the port to the agricultural powerhouse of the Cibao Valley. But those days are long gone, and now the town is quietly going to seed, kept alive only by its fishing industry and the tourists. The old, prosperous times are visible in a handful of ornate but crumbling gingerbread-style mansions near the waterfront.

Commanding a spectacular view of the valley that Columbus dubbed La Vega Real (Royal Valley), the 19th-century church of Santo Cerro reputedly marks the spot where the Virgin made a miraculous intervention in 1495. The cross that she defended from burning by the Tainos was, according to legend, erected on the hillside by Columbus himself, and the church claims to preserve a fragment of the original crucifix. It’s surrounded by ornate Catholic iconography.

La Capital has something for everyone, whether cobbled colonial-era streets steeped in history or state-of-the-art shopping malls. A patchwork of ancient and modern, the sprawling city lives life at a frantic pace, with gridlocked streets and other urban challenges. But there are quiet corners and shady plazas in the Zona Colonial, extensive parks offering fresh air, peace, and quiet, and the magnificent seaside Malecón, the favorite playground of Santo Domingo’s inhabitants (see Santo Domingo: The Zona Colonial).

A wild and rugged range of mountains that march westwards over the Haitian border, these impressive peaks make up the Dominican Republic’s second highest sierra. It was in this impenetrable tangle of mountains, valleys, and forests that the Taino leader Enriquillo (see Enriquillo (1498–1535)) assembled his rebel forces and held out for 14 years against the Spanish. Now designated a national park, the range is covered in dense pine forests and subtropical rainforest. There are few passable roads, but it’s theoretically possible, with a sturdy jeep, to drive along the rough track from Pedernales to Aguacate.

Like other North Coast communities, Sosúa’s transformation from a small fishing town and banana port to a pulsating tourist venue has been little short of astonishing. The place developed a rather unsavory reputation in the 1980s for the worst excesses of tourism, but has been cleaned up since and now offers a great mixture of nightlife and lazy days on the beach. Divided by the beach and bay into two separate and different barrios , Sosúa has a distinct tourist area called El Batey, where streets are lined with cafés and stores, and the more authentically Dominican district of Los Charamicos.

This is an ideal place for outdoor activities, ranging from hiking and horseback riding to challenging river-based sports, and the resorts of Jarabacoa and Constanza specialize in excursions. The climate and lack of urban spread also contribute to a wide and varied range of fauna and flora, making it a paradise for bird-watchers and botanists (see Constanza & “The Dominican Alps”).

The whale-watching season around Samaná generally lasts from January to March, when an estimated 12,000 humpback whales – the whole population of the North Atlantic – converge on the waters around the Peninsula. The mating and rearing activity takes place in Banca de Plata (Silver Bank) to the north of the Peninsula, and in and around the bay itself, where the shallow and warm water is conducive to courtship displays as well as birthing. Humpback whales can weigh up to 40 tons, so their acrobatics of diving, rolling, and leaping clean out of the water are spectacular.