La Romana

The city takes its name from Bomana, the Indigenous name for the river now called the Río Dulce, at whose mouth it stands. La Romana was officially founded in 1897, when the national congress granted a Cuban firm a concession to build an oil refinery, and for its first two decades it was a struggling place with little future.

Everything changed in 1917, when an American sugar company built the huge Central Romana mill. Its opening coincided with a rise in world sugar prices, and workers came from across the country and from other Caribbean islands to cut and process cane from the plantations that still surround the city. La Romana became a company town, and its mill was the only sugar operation not taken over by Rafael Trujillo during his rule.

In the 1960s an American conglomerate took over the mill, invested in livestock, and spent heavily rebuilding the town with schools, clinics and workers' housing. In the mid-1970s, as it began selling its Dominican assets, it built a large luxury resort east of the city, and from 1976 the stone village of Altos de Chavón rose above the Chavón River. In 1984 the sugar company passed to a group of local and foreign investors. A cruise terminal opened at the river mouth in 2002, and the modern international airport in 2000.

Baseball is the city's passion. The Toros del Este, founded in 1983 as the Azucareros del Este, play in the Dominican winter league at the 10,000-seat Estadio Francisco Micheli and have won three national championships and a Caribbean Series. La Romana has produced a long list of Major League players, and boxing and basketball also have strong followings; the city's sports centre is named after Eleoncio Mercedes, a local flyweight who became world champion.

Music and the arts have two faces. In town, merengue and bachata fill the colmados and the streets, and the bachata and merengue singer Monchy, of the duo Monchy y Alexandra, is from La Romana. At Altos de Chavón, a design school affiliated with Parsons School of Design in New York has trained Dominican designers and artists since 1983, and the amphitheatre has hosted Frank Sinatra, Santana and Julio Iglesias, and the Concert for the Americas was held there in August 1982.

The village's church of St Stanislaus, named after the patron saint of Poland in tribute to Pope John Paul II, is a popular place for weddings. As in the rest of the country, Catholic feasts, family Sundays and the baseball calendar shape the year.

An estimated 153,000 people lived within La Romana's city limits in 2022, and around 270,000 in the wider metropolitan area, making it one of the ten largest cities in the country. The town remains closely tied to the sugar company, which owns property across the city, and many landowners rent their land to grow cane for the mill.

Employment is high, in tourism, at the sugar mill, in the free-trade zone and in service businesses. La Romana is also a cigar city: one of the largest cigar factories in the world has worked here since an American conglomerate moved its cigar-making to the city after 1968, producing some of the world's best-known cigar brands. The port exports sugar and handles containers, fuel and cruise ships.

Life in the centre revolves around the central park, the markets and the church, with guaguas and motoconchos filling the streets. Beyond the city, the cane fields and their workers' villages are among the poorest communities in the region, a sharp contrast with the gated resort estate just east of town.

La Romana eats like the rest of the Dominican east. Lunch is la bandera — white rice, red beans, stewed meat and salad — and sancocho, a thick stew of several meats and root vegetables, is the dish many Dominicans see out the old year with. Fried fish with tostones, twice-fried slices of green plantain, is common on the coast.

Street food is a big part of the city's eating. Vendors walk the streets and markets selling homemade food, and fried snacks such as empanadas, chicharrón and yaniqueques, crisp rounds of fried dough, are sold everywhere. Vendors also set up stands selling juices made from papaya and other fruits.

The province has long raised livestock, and coconut water and tropical fruit are sold from carts. Altos de Chavón has Mediterranean-style restaurants with views over the river, while the town's own tables stay Dominican. Presidente beer, rum and mamajuana are the everyday drinks, and the city's cigars often follow a meal.