Bayahibe, the picturesque coastal town in La Altagracia province, which La Romana claims, is a tourist destination that receives more than a million visitors a year and owes its name to the Taíno language
SANTO DOMINGO.- According to the Urgent Spanish Foundation (Fundéu Guzmán Ariza), the word comes from the indigenous words “baya”, referring to a bivalve mollusk and the calabash tree, and “jibe” or “hibe”, the sieve that the Taíno used to sift the cassava flour in the preparation of casabe.
Bayahíbe: a place name linked to daily life and primal resources. A linguistic heritage that survives in this strip of the Dominican Caribbean coast.
Origin
Its founding dates back to 1874 with the arrival of the Puerto Rican Juan Brito, and for almost a century, fishing was almost the only commercial activity: its inhabitants went to sea in sailing boats and depended on the wind for the return.
In the 1970s, few ventured along that impassable dirt road to reach those turquoise waters, where children, starfish, mosquitoes, and sea urchins played.
And then came Wayne Fuller, American or Canadian depending on who tells his story, who against all odds built the first rustic stone cabins for tourists in an isolated Bayahibe without roads, and who later promoted the land-use plan he named Dominicus Americanus, a fusion of “Dominican” and “American”.
The seed of the current hotel cluster, in which the names of Ettore Colussi and Rafael Blanco Canto, founders of Club Dominicus in 1987, shine, is in Fuller's project, which covered two thousand acres, five miles of beach and five all-inclusive resorts, which attracted residents from different parts of the country and foreigners who stayed.
Attractive
The State created the Eastern National Park, now Cotubanamá National Park, with Decree 1311 of September 16, 1975, protecting Saona Island and Catalinita Cay. It features ecological trails, over 400 registered caves, petroglyphs, and underground lagoons with blue waters.
Saona Island: The largest and most famous for its white beaches fringed with coconut palms and its shallow natural pools.
Catalina Island: It is ideal for snorkeling and diving due to its coral reefs; it is also where the remains of the Quedagh Merchant are located, and it is a site for diving and underwater archaeology.
Dominicus Beach: Certified with Blue Flag for quality, it is the strip that concentrates a good part of the all-inclusive hotel offer of the area.
Palmilla Natural Pool: A strip of shallow water in the open sea, popular for swimming and relaxing away from the coast.
Bridge Cave and Our Father Trail: System of caves and freshwater cenotes within the national park, with a centuries-old tree growing inside one of them and petroglyphs on its walls.
The town of Bayahibe
The small town, with its restaurants, artisan shops, and colorful wooden houses, is a reminder of its past as a fishing village. It has 5,600 residents, according to the 2022 Census, and the floating population reaches peaks of 7,000 to 8,000 people, says Yesenia Brito, the municipal director. Occupancy hovers around 80% in its nearly 6,000 rooms, notes Andrés Fernández, president of the La Romana-Bayahíbe Hotel Association.
Particularities
Nature was so bountiful that they have a unique flower: the Bayahibe Rose (Pereskia quisqueyana), an endemic cactus that the botanist Alain Liogier described in 1977 and that the National Congress, through Law 146-11 of July 2011, declared the National Flower of the Dominican Republic.
In December 2007, off Catalina Island, archaeologists from Indiana University, led by Charles Beeker, confirmed the discovery of the remains of the Quedagh Merchant, the ship abandoned by the Scottish pirate William Kidd in 1699 after its capture in the Indian Ocean. The project gave rise to "living museums at sea": the same sea that sustained the fishermen became a historical landmark and tourist attraction.
Recommended readings:
