Barahona

Before the Spanish arrived, the coast here was part of the Taíno chiefdom of Jaragua, ruled by Bohechío. The city and province take their name from the Barahona surname: several Spaniards called Barahona arrived on Columbus's first and second voyages in the 1490s, and some settlers came from the town of Baraona in Spain.

After independence in 1844 Barahona was a military post of Azua province. It became a municipality in 1858 and the head of its own province in 1881. Cuban radicals founded a revolutionary group, El Salvador, here to raise money for Cuba's independence from Spain, and with help from President Ulises Heureaux weapons were shipped to Cuba from Barahona's shores.

Sugar made the modern city. During the US occupation of 1916–1924 cane planting spread, and construction of the sugar mill began in 1918, together with the workers' quarter of El Batey, now Villa Central. In 1916 a Barahona priest asked permission to mine a blue stone he had found; in 1927 the first aviation company in the Caribbean began flights from the city to Santo Domingo, San Juan and Port-au-Prince. The town hall dates from 1935 and the cathedral from 1948. In 1974 the blue stone was rediscovered on a beach and named larimar, and mining in the mountains followed. The city's airport has had no regular scheduled flights in recent years, and the port, the mill and the mines remain its mainstays.

Barahona has given the country two great stars of entertainment. María Montez, born in the province, became a Hollywood film star and died in Paris in 1951; the city's airport bears her name. Casandra Damirón, born in 1919, started performing at six in the town's La Unión theatre and became a celebrated singer, dancer and folklorist; the Casandra awards for Dominican artists, created in the 1980s, carried her name until 2012. Baseball players from the city, among them Julio Lugo and Edinson Vólquez, have reached the major leagues.

Craft is a living tradition. Larimar, a rare blue variety of the mineral pectolite found only around Barahona, is cut and polished into jewellery, and artisans in the town and in the coastal barrios also work in metal, shells and natural fibres. Its name joins Larissa, the daughter of one of the men who rediscovered it, and mar, the Spanish word for sea.

The coast and mountains shape local pastimes. Barahona is the main destination for the country's amateur surfers, and the national surf federation has held competitions on its beaches, while the trails through forest, caves and coffee farms draw mountain bikers. In the evenings people gather in the central park, the colmados and the bars of the town centre.

About 90,000 people lived in Barahona at the 2022 census, making it the port and commercial centre of the south coast. It has a mixed economy of agriculture, cattle, mining and tourism, with one of the busiest ports in the region, a power station, a sugar mill and a free zone of textile factories.

The countryside grows cane, plantains, fruit, sorghum, yams and yautía, and the mountains of the eastern Bahoruco produce the city's best-known product, Barahona coffee. Cattle and goats are fattened for meat and leather, and milk production is growing. Mining is a major employer: gypsum is quarried, and the hills yield marble, alabaster, kaolin for bottle-making, salt and larimar, mined at Los Chupaderos, about 10 km south-west of the city, from a mountainside riddled with some 2,000 shafts.

Life starts early and slows in the midday heat, and motoconchos carry most people around town. Ecotourism along the coast road and in the mountains is growing slowly.

Barahona sits on the Caribbean, yet much of the fish and shrimp eaten in town comes from the rivers and freshwater lagoons inland. Lagoon fish such as tilapia and biejaca are served boiled or stewed, and freshwater shrimp are popular too. From the sea, crab, conch and lobster are preferred, prepared with lime or garlic or stewed.

Goat and beef are cooked in a cacerola, a casserole stew, and sancocho with beans is made with beef, chicken, goat and pork. Everyday lunch follows the Dominican pattern of la bandera — rice, beans and stewed meat — and plantains, yams and yautía from the surrounding farms appear at almost every meal.

The city's pride is its coffee, grown on the slopes of the Bahoruco mountains and sold as Barahona coffee. It is drunk strong and sweet throughout the day, and in the evenings Presidente beer and rum are drunk in the bars and colmados around the central park and along the seafront.