The country is a tropical, maritime nation. Conditions are ameliorated in many areas by elevation and by the northeast trade winds, which blow steadily from the Atlantic all year long. The annual mean temperature is 25 °C; regional mean temperatures range from 18 °C in the heart of the Cordillera Central (Constanza) to as high as 27 °C in arid regions. Temperatures rarely rise above 32 °C, and freezing temperatures only occur in winter in the highest mountains. The average temperature in Santo Domingo in January is 24 °C and 27 °C in July.
The rain season for the northern coast is from November to January. For the rest of the country, the rain season is from May to November. The average annual rainfall es 1,346 mm, with extremes of 2,500 mm or more in the mountainous northeast (the windward side of the island) and 500 mm in the southwestern valleys. The western valleys, along the Haitian border, remain relatively dry, with less than 760 mm of annual precipitation. The northwestern and southeastern extremes of the country are also arid.
The Dominican Republic is occasionally damaged by tropical storms and hurricanes, which originate in the mid-Atlantic and southeastern Caribbean from June until November (mainly from August to October) each year.
There are several smaller islands and cays that are part of the Dominican territory. The largest islands are:
Saona, close to the southeastern coast of the Hispaniola, in the Caribbean Sea. It has an area of 117 km². Its Taíno name was Iai or Adamanay. Columbus named this island as Savona after the Italian city of the same name but the use during years has eliminated the letter v.
Beata, in the southern coast of the Hispaniola, in the Caribbean Sea. It has an area of 27 km². Its Taíno name is unknown. Columbus named this island as Madama Beata.
Catalina, very close to the southeastern coast of the Hispaniola, in the Caribbean Sea. It has an area of 9.6 km². Its Taíno name was Iabanea but some writers, including poets, say that it was called Toeya or Toella. It was discoverd by Columbus and named it as Santa Catalina.
The Dominican Republic (Spanish: República Dominicana, Spanish pronunciation: [reˈpuβlika ðominiˈkana]) is a nation located in the Caribbean region. It is on the island of Hispaniola in the Greater Antilles archipelago. Hispaniola lies west of Puerto Rico and east of Cuba and Jamaica. The western third of Hispaniola is the nation of Haiti, making Hispaniola one of two Caribbean islands that are occupied by two countries, Saint Martin being the other.
The Dominican Republic is the site of the first permanent European settlement in the Americas, its capital Santo Domingo, which was also the first colonial capital in the Americas. It is the site of the first cathedral, university, European-built road, European-built fortress, and more.
For most of its independent history, the nation experienced political turmoil and unrest, suffering through many non-representative and tyrannical governments. Since the death of military dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina in 1961, the Dominican Republic has moved toward representative democracy.
The Taínos
The island of Hispaniola was inhabited by the Taínos, an Arawakan-speaking people, who may have arrived around A.D. 600, displacing earlier inhabitants.[4] The Taínos lived in villages headed by chiefs and called the island Kiskeya or Quisqueya, meaning "highest land", as well as Ayti and Bohio.[5] By 1492, they were divided into five chiefdoms (cacicazgos in Spanish, from cacique, chief).
There are widely varying estimates of the population of Hispaniola in 1492, including 100,000, 300,000 3 million, and 7-8 million. They engaged principally in farming and fishing, as well as hunting and gathering.
Spanish rule
Christopher Columbus landed at Môle Saint-Nicolas on December 5, 1492, in his first voyage, and claimed the island for Spain. Nineteen days later, the Santa Maria ran aground near the present site of Cap-Haitien; Columbus was forced to leave 39 men, founding the settlement of La Navidad. He returned to Spain, but sailed back to America three more times.
After initially friendly relations, the Taínos resisted the conquest. One of the earliest leaders to fight against the Spanish was the male Chief Anacaona of Xaragua, in the southwest, who married Chief Caonabo of Maguana, in the center and south of the island. The two fought hard against the Europeans; she was captured by the Spanish and executed in front of her people. Other notables who resisted include Chief Guacanagari, Chief Guamá, and Chief Hatuey, who later fled to Cuba and helped fight the Spaniards there. Chief Enriquillo fought victoriously against the Spaniards in the Baoruco Mountain Range, in the southwest, to gain freedom for himself and his people in a part of the island. The Taínos were by then nearly extinct. Most of the survivors mixed with runaway African slaves, called cimarrones, producing zambos. The mestizos increased in number as native women conceived to European men.
By the mid-1500s the majority of Taíno people had died from mistreatment, diseases to which they had no immunity, suicide, the breakup of family unity, starvation,[4] forced labor, torture, and war with the Spaniards. In 1561 Bartolomé de las Casas wrote that when he reached Hispaniola in 1508 "There were 60,000 people living on this island, including the Indians; so that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war, slavery and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this?"
Some scholars believe that Las Casas exaggerated the Indian population decline in an effort to persuade King Carlos to intervene, and that encomenderos also exaggerated it, in order to receive permission to import more African slaves. Moreover, censuses of the time did not account for the number of Indians who fled into remote communities. There they often joined with runaway Africans. There were also confusing issues with racial categorization. People of Spanish and Taino descent (mestizo) who were culturally Spanish were counted as Spaniards. Some scholars believe that many Dominicans today retain Taíno ancestry.
In 1496 Bartolomeo Columbus, Christopher's brother, built the city of Nueva Isabela (New Isabella), now Santo Domingo, in the south of Hispaniola. It was one of the first Spanish settlements and became Europe's first permanent settlement in the New World. The Spaniards created a plantation economy on Hispaniola, particularly from the second half of the 16th century. The island became a springboard for European conquest of the Caribbean islands, called "Antilles", and soon after, the South American mainland, including contemporary coastal Venezuela and Colombia.
For decades Santo Domingo colony was the headquarters of Spanish colonial power in the New World. With the Spanish conquest of the mainland empires of the Aztecs and Incas, the importance of Hispaniola declined and Spain paid less attention to it. French bucaneers settled in the western part of the island. By the 1697 Treaty of Ryswick, Spain ceded that part of Hispaniola to France. It grew into the wealthy colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), with four times as much population as Spanish Santo Domingo by the end of the 18th century.
French rule
France came to own the whole island in 1795, when by the Treaty of Basel Spain ceded Santo Domingo as a consequence of the French Revolutionary Wars. At the time slaves led by Toussaint Louverture in the western part (Haiti) were in revolt against France. In 1801 Toussaint Louverture captured Santo Domingo from the French, thus gaining control of the entire island.
In 1802 an army sent by Napoleon captured Toussaint Louverture and sent him to France as prisoner. Toussaint Louverture's successors, and yellow fever, succeeded in expelling the French again from Saint-Domingue. The nation declared independence as Haiti in 1804.
France went on to recover Spanish Santo Domingo. In 1808, following Napoleon's invasion of Spain, the criollos of Santo Domingo revolted against French rule, and with Great Britain's (Spain's ally) and Haiti's help, returned Santo Domingo to Spanish control.
The Ephemeral Independence and Haitian rule
After a dozen years of Spanish misrule and neglect and failed independence plots by various groups, former Spanish Lieutenant-Governor José Núñez de Cáceres declared the colony's independence as the state of Haití Español (Spanish Haiti) on November 30, 1821. He requested admission to Simón Bolívar's nation of Gran Colombia. But the new nation's independence was short-lived. Haitian forces, led by Jean-Pierre Boyer, invaded just nine weeks later in February 1822.
As Toussaint Louverture had done the first time, the Haitians abolished slavery. But they nationalized all public property; most private property, including all the property of landowners who had left in the wake of the invasion; much Church property; as well as all property belonging to the former rulers, the Spanish Crown. All levels of education suffered collapse; the university was shut down, as it was starved of resources and all Dominican men from 16 to 25-years-old were drafted into the Haitian army. Haiti imposed a "heavy tribute" on the Dominican people. Many whites fled Santo Domingo for Puerto Rico and Cuba — both still under Spanish rule — Venezuela, and elsewhere.
Boyer changed the Dominican economic system to place more emphasis on cash crops to be grown on large plantations, reformed the tax system, and allowed foreign trade. But the new system was widely opposed by Dominican farmers, although it produced a boom in sugar and coffee production. Boyer's troops, which included many Dominicans, were unpaid, and had to "forage and sack" from Dominican civilians. In the end the economy faltered and taxation became more onerous. Rebellions occurred even by freed Dominican slaves, while Dominicans and Haitians worked together to oust Boyer from power. Anti–Haitian movements of several kinds — pro–independence, pro–Spanish, pro–French, pro–British, pro–United States — gathered force following Boyer's overthrow in 1843.
Independence
In 1838 Juan Pablo Duarte founded a secret society called La Trinitaria that sought pure and simple independence of Santo Domingo without any foreign intervention. Ramón Matías Mella and Francisco del Rosario Sánchez (the latter of partly African ancestry), despite not being among the founding members of Trinitaria, were decisive in the fight for independence. They are now hailed, together with Duarte, as the Founding Fathers of the Dominican Republic. On February 27, 1844, the Trinitarios, as the members of La Trinitaria were known, declared independence from Haiti. They were backed by Pedro Santana, a wealthy cattle-rancher from El Seibo who became general of the army of the nascent Republic and is known as "El Liberador." The Dominican Republic's first Constitution was adopted on November 6, 1845, and was modeled after the United States Constitution.
The decades that followed were filled with tyranny, factionalism, economic difficulties, rapid changes of government, and exile for political opponents. Threatening the nation's independence were renewed Haitian invasions occurring in 1844, 1845-49, 1849-55, and 1855-56.
Meanwhile, archrivals Santana and Buenaventura Báez held power most of the time, both ruling arbitrarily. They promoted competing plans to annex the new nation to another power: Santana favored Spain, and Báez the United States.
