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Perhaps the country’s best museum, its collection of pre-Columbian artifacts reveals the intricacy of indigenous sculpture in the shape of jewelry and religious figurines or zemis . Another display charts the impact of African slavery on culture with an eye-opening exhibition of carnival costumes and a model of a voodoo altar.

Exhibits from Museo del Hombre Dominicano

The colonial period is highlighted in this museum, housed in the 16th-century governor’s Supreme Court. Period paintings and furniture give a powerful taste of the luxurious lifestyle of the Spanish élite, while a collection of weapons shows how the Tanios were subjugated.

Freedom fighter Pablo Duarte (see Juan Pablo Duarte (1813–1873)) is honored in this modest one-story house where he was born. The mementos mostly comprise documents and paintings, but the three elegant rooms also contain fine furniture and iconography relating to Duarte’s underground independence organization, La Trinitaria.

The small town of Salcedo is unexceptional, apart from its museum commemorating the lives and deaths of the three Mirabal sisters, courageous opponents of Trujillo, who were murdered on the orders of the dictator in 1960. The little family house contains a collection of photographs and everyday personal effects.

Part of the Modernist Plaza de la Cultura complex, the collection covers everything from Taino life to the US occupation, with an emphasis on struggles with Haiti. The most fascinating section deals with the excesses of the Trujillo period, including a bullet-riddled car, removed from the scene of his assassination.

The house in which this 19th-century collection of domestic items is kept is more interesting than the museum itself. The 1503 mansion contains the only double Gothic window in the Americas. This colonial gem also exhibits the furniture and personal effects of a well-to-do Santo Domingo family.

The four-story modern art gallery demonstrates the vitality and range of contemporary Dominican creativity. Permanent exhibitions are interspersed with temporary shows, revealing a tension between bucolic paintings of idealized rural life and darker, more sinister meditations on poverty and the country’s violent past.

This museum is a surprising oasis of fine art within an uptown car showroom. The private collection here encompasses big names of modern Dominican art such as Jaime Colson, the master of rustic realism, and the Spanish anarchist exile, José Vela Zanetti, whose impressionistic celebration of peasant life forms the centerpiece of the swanky gallery.

The small exhibition next door to Sosúa’s synagogue tells the story of the country’s Jewish community, invited by Trujillo in 1940 to form an agricultural colony. Photographs, letters, and a sprinkling of 1940s artifacts explain how they fled the Nazis, settled in this North Coast town, and started a dairy cooperative.

One of the capital’s newest museums. An attractively presented, multilingual exhibition explains the process of mining and shaping the semi-precious blue stone into exquisite jewelry. It’s situated in a lovely colonial-period house, where on the ground floor you can buy fine examples of larimar jewels.