Dominican Republic

The Dominican Republic holds both the highest and the lowest ground in the Caribbean: Pico Duarte in the Cordillera Central, and the shore of Lake Enriquillo, a salt lake below sea level with American crocodiles. It fills the eastern two-thirds of Hispaniola. The Cibao valley is the farming heartland, the south-west is dry thorn country, and humpback whales calve in the bay of Samaná each winter. White beaches fringe Punta Cana in the east.

Santo Domingo, founded by Christopher Columbus’s brother Bartholomew in the 1490s, is the oldest European city in the Americas still inhabited, and its cathedral was the first in the New World. Spain ceded the colony to France in 1795, and Haiti ruled the whole island from 1822. Juan Pablo Duarte’s secret society prepared the revolt that won independence in February 1844. United States marines held the country from 1916 to 1924, and Rafael Trujillo ruled from 1930 until his assassination in 1961.

Merengue and bachata were both born here, and they play in every colmado, the corner shop that doubles as a bar. Baseball is the national passion, and the sugar town of San Pedro de Macorís has sent a long line of shortstops to the major leagues. Lunch is la bandera: rice, red beans and stewed meat. Junot Díaz and Julia Álvarez wrote of Dominican lives in New York. Tourism is the big earner, alongside cigars from the Cibao, cocoa, gold from Pueblo Viejo and ferronickel from Bonao.