Dominican Republic Real Estate - Caribbean Investments properties specialist

The Dominican Republic's Samaná Peninsula has become a magnet for expatriates drawn to its classic Caribbean ambience and for hospitality entrepreneurs looking for the next great place.

"I realized I could live here," a Frenchwoman named Armell Cogez tells me, "and have a big garden, too." 

So four years ago she and her husband, Cyril, emigrated from Lille to the tiny seaside town of Las Galeras, on the tip of the Dominican Republic's Samaná Peninsula.

Samaná Essentials: Where to Go, Where to Stay and What to Do...

I found myself chatting with Madame Cogez because what I had first assumed to be a typical colmadon, one of those Dominican neighborhood joints for rum and gossip, turned out to be a trim little épicerie, a boutique delicatessen, where the owner and her clients - one German, one Swiss - were discussing charcuterie meats and Livarot cheese in animated French.

Las Galeras is a delightfully ragtag fishing village with a towel-on-the-sand atmosphere and a wind-swept beach. I first went there about 20 years ago, fell in love with its timeless Caribbean character, and vowed to return someday to flake out among the fishing boats drawn up on the sand, within aroma distance of the fresh shrimp cooking on the grills. That day turned out to be more distant than I had hoped, and when I finally made it back this past spring, I experienced the usual frissons of trepidation, dreading to find that the town's main drag (indeed, its only drag) had been tarted up with emporia or that the ladies with the grills had been deposed by sushi bars. 

I had just come from a delightful 21-room hotel owned by a Croatian lady and run by a German lady, and now I was in the middle of a scene that happens scores of times a day in Provence. Armell and Cyril Cogez had vacationed in Las Galeras for 10 years before settling here, growing that big garden and opening their authentic little épicerie; her European customers, likewise, had come upon this quiet little backwater while vacationing and decided that this was where they wanted to live. Love at first sight - it was a romantic song I heard many times on my weeklong jaunt through the Samaná Peninsula, from the mouths of expatriates from France, Germany, Spain, the Azores, the Basque Country, Toronto and Colorado. The world, it seems, is discovering this unique corner of the Dominican Republic.

The Samaná Peninsula is the northeasternmost tip of the island of Hispaniola, jutting into the Atlantic and forming the great sweep of Bahia Samaná. The drive from the town of Sanchez in the west to the village of Las Galeras in the east covers a mere 40 miles; the distance from the bay shore to the Atlantic coastline is only 10 miles at the peninsula's widest point. Given the hills, indentations and ambushing potholes, however, the usual miles-per-hour calculations become the motoring equivalent of island time. Not that you'd want to drive fast anyway; the scenery is too beguiling for that. Samaná is noted for its cocoteros, or coconut palms. Millions of them. Groves of cocoteros line the beaches and cloak the hillsides, and in the sharp afternoon sunlight they fill the landscape with a green so vivid and brilliant it seems to have been digitally enhanced. When I'm not looking at coconut groves, I'm catching glimpses of inviting beaches. Unlike the long stretches of strand at, say, Punta Cana to the south, the beaches of Samaná are mostly cozy coves embraced by hills or cliffs, like playas Fronton and Rincon near Las Galeras, or Limon, Moron and Karisma near El Limon. Many of them can be reached only by boat or scraggly footpath (and it wouldn't surprise if some of them have never known a human footprint), but that still leaves more than enough desert-island escapes to fill a week of 

Despite all this natural beauty, the peninsula has often been overlooked by even the most popular travel guides and overshadowed by major tourist destinations such as Puerto Plata and Punta Cana - until now. Like any Edenic getaway, the Samaná Peninsula is not immune from insinuating progress. Cruise ships - biggies, alas - now make frequent calls at the town of Santa Bárbara de Samaná (the regional capital, commonly referred to as Samaná); a brand-new airport, El Catey, capable of handling international flights, has just gone into service at the western end of the peninsula; and two years ago the government opened a new highway that cuts the driving time from the Dominican Republic's capital city of Santo Domingo to Sanchez to two-and-a-half hours. Will an influx of weekend trippers from the capital encourage a flood of hotels and gated condos? Will charter flights from Europe lead to rows of high-rise, low-price all-inclusives? What, I wondered, will happen to all the whales?

Some 85 percent of all humpback whales that cruise up and down the North Atlantic seaboard are conceived and born in the waters of the Dominican Republic. Judging by the ancient petroglyphs in nearby native Taíno caves, they've been repeat visitors for centuries. Each December, some 1,500 of them gather in the warm, shallow waters of Bahia Samaná to do what nature prompts them to do.

"It's like one big spring break for whales," says sea-tanned Kim Beddall of Victoria Marine tours. And she should know. Beddall came to Samaná from her native Canada 25 years ago in response to an ad for a dive instructor. "I loved the warm weather," she says, "but after several years as a divemaster, I became more interested in the whales." There were no formal whale-watching activities back then, so Beddall bought her first sightseeing boat, a 23-footer, and took people for excursions around the bay. Now she's owner and skipper of the Victoria II, a sturdy 50-foot launch that makes trips twice a day during the season, wind and waves permitting. 

I bobbed around for a few hours aboard Victoria II, hoping to score a sighting. It was late in the season (mid-March), but we eventually caught up with one family of humpbacks. The adult whales shied from us, but their frisky calf performed a flipper breach, a spy loop, a couple of tail lobs and other silly Megaptera novaeangliae tricks. Visitors who miss the whale-watching season can catch up with these legendary creatures by taking a boat trip across the bay to Los Haitises National Park and scouting around mangrove forests and caves where the ancient Taíno people made their whale petroglyphs.

One of the most popular ways to get up close to the sights and scents of the tropics is a horseback ride through the rainforest, in the heart of the peninsula, starting out from the hill town of El Limon, just off the main road between the towns of Samaná and Las Terrenas. The procedure here is to stop off at a parada, or entry point, to link up with guides, size up the horses and stock up on bottled water, then set out at a slow clip-clop through groves of native trees such as the cigua blanca and the uva de sierra, past small, brightly painted homes made of palm wood and thatch, to the 140-foot El Salto del Limon waterfall for three hours of escapism, Indiana Jones-style - with a dunk in a refreshing swimming hole as a reward.

Up on the Atlantic coast, Las Terrenas is another fishing village poised for development and ready to merengue. It's flanked on either side by a string of largely undeveloped, covelike beaches where the sand is separated from clusters of small hotels and rental cottages by dirt tracks - barely wide enough for one car - that wind among the coconut palms. A typical Antillean hodgepodge, its narrow streets bustle with pedicabs, and its sidewalks overflow with dimly lit supermercados and colmadons, and enough displays of paintings and carvings to qualify it as an artists colony if only the exhibits could be designated "art."

"The next St.Tropez" is a frequent boast, but I can't see Las Terrenas as a Riviera-style playground, and most of the locals I talked to, native and expat alike, seem to be less than keen on the idea of an influx of the beautiful people. But there is a certain buzz and vibe to the place, a budding urbanity that owes much to a group of expatriates who have opened restaurants, augmenting the local shrimp with coco with a broad array of international cuisines.

Samaná Essentials: Where to Eat...

The buzz focuses on a narrow street known as Pueblo de los Pescadores, a row of former fishing huts that has morphed into a tourist-friendly strip that includes a sports bar, a tapas bar, a couple of pizzerias and assorted restaurants. They're all casual and relaxed, as beach-side dining should be. If you seat yourselves at La Terrasse, for example, the proprietor, Willy Barrera ("I came here for vacation from the Canary Islands and decided to stay …"), won't be insulted if one of your group wants pizza and your waiter has to slip through the billowing curtains to fetch your order from the pizzeria next door. 

At Playa Coson, west of town, The Beach redefines "beach" style by filling a traditional seaside cottage with museum-caliber antiques and a refined design esthetic. (The toilets even have small flagons of Bulgari eau de toilette.) Check the handwritten daily menu for the delicately flavored Camarones Chinole (shrimp prepared with a passion fruit sauce). 

Another hot spot dedicated to raising the town's culinary ambitions (and prices) to the next level is the two-year-old Mi Corazon, a bi-level courtyard restaurant that weds white-on-white minimalism with traditional Mexican hacienda grandeur. Its creators are a quartet of Swiss/French chefs and restaurateurs who started visiting the Dominican Republic decades ago. Says co-owner Werner "Lilo" Kipfer, an effusive greeter and enthusiastic cheerleader for Las Terrenas: "After we rented a house here we decided to open a restaurant for fine dining because the town is getting sophisticated faster than everyone thought …"