Las Galeras

Las Galeras, Spanish for "the galleys", takes its name from two galleys that anchored here in the middle of the 16th century. The village sits on the eastern side of Rincón Bay, a V-shaped bay at the north-eastern tip of the Samaná peninsula, sheltered from the open Atlantic by two headlands, Cabo Cabrón and Cabo Samaná. The bay is remembered as the place where the Indigenous Ciguayos first resisted Christopher Columbus's men with force, which is why the admiral named it the Bay of Arrows.

For a long time Las Galeras was a section of the municipality of Santa Bárbara de Samaná, the town founded by Canary Islanders on Samaná Bay in 1756. Like the rest of the province, it lived mainly from fishing and farming.

Its administrative standing rose on 16 June 2005, when a law raised Las Galeras to a municipal district of Samaná. The El Catey airport opened in 2006 and a newer highway shortened the bus journey from Santo Domingo, yet the village has stayed far smaller and quieter than Las Terrenas on the north shore. In recent years it has drawn backpackers and independent travellers for its remote beaches, camping and hiking, and for the simple fact that it lies at the very end of the peninsula's road.

Las Galeras mixes a Dominican fishing village with a small international community. Most residents are Dominican, but there are also Haitian residents and settlers from Italy, France, the United States, Canada, Britain, Belgium and Switzerland.

Local life follows the sea and the seasons. Fishermen keep their boats on Playa Grande, and the same boats carry visitors to the outer beaches. The whale season, from about January to mid-April, is the busiest time of year, when humpback whales gather in the waters off the peninsula to breed. The village is not a nightlife destination, but its bars and a few weekend clubs fill with residents and visitors, and music from the colmados carries into the evening.

The wider Samaná peninsula has its own heritage, shaped by the descendants of African American settlers who arrived in the 1820s and kept their English and Protestant churches, and the village shares in the province's coconut cooking and slow, outdoor rhythm. Visitors are expected to dress modestly away from the beach and to greet people before asking for anything.

About 7,500 people live in the municipal district of Las Galeras; at the 2022 census its population was counted within the municipality of Santa Bárbara de Samaná. Most are Dominican, with a noticeable share of foreign residents.

The economy rests on the same three activities as the rest of the province: tourism, fishing and farming. Tourism here is small-scale — guesthouses, apartments and small hotels in the village rather than on the beach, a single large all-inclusive resort, three dive centres, boat trips and local taxis — and many jobs depend on the whale season and the winter months. Fishing boats still work out of Playa Grande, and coconuts and other crops are grown on the land behind the coast.

Daily life is unhurried. Motoconchos are the main way to get around, guaguas link the village with Samaná town until the late afternoon, and shopping for anything beyond the basics means the trip back along the peninsula. Cash matters more than in larger resorts, as cards are not always accepted.

Las Galeras eats like the rest of the Samaná peninsula, where cooking with coconut is the signature. The province is the country's main coconut producer, and dishes cooked with coconut represent its kitchen: visitors ask for pescado con coco, fish cooked with coconut, with rice cooked with coconut on the side. Coconut sweets such as dulce de coco are common Dominican desserts, and seaside fishing villages across the country offer a wide variety of seafood, most often shrimp, marlin, dorado and lobster.

In the village, simple comedores serve the Dominican set lunch of rice, beans, meat and salad, and pica pollo, crisp fried chicken. Most restaurants are along the main road, serving fresh seafood alongside Dominican and international dishes.

On the beaches, vendors sell snacks and drinks, and the catch landed on Playa Grande goes straight to the kitchens nearby. As elsewhere in the country, Presidente beer, rum and mamajuana are the drinks of the beach bars.