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Santo Domingo Colonial Zone Tour

★★★★★ (23 customer reviews)

From $45

Yes, it's three hours each way — and still the best day you'll spend off the resort. Santo Domingo is the oldest European-founded city in the Americas, and its Colonial Zone is a UNESCO World Heritage Site packed with the New World's firsts. Walk it with a guide, eat a real Dominican lunch, and see the country the beach never shows you.

Duration: Approx 12 Hours Time of Day: Morning
Adult: $80

13 and over is Adult

Child: $45

3-12 is a child

Estimated total $0

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Santo Domingo: A Real City, a Long Day, Worth It

Straight talk first: Santo Domingo sits about three hours west of Punta Cana, so this is a full day on the road and on your feet. Here's why people do it anyway — it's the oldest continuously inhabited European city in the Americas, the place Christopher Columbus set in motion in 1492, and its Colonial Zone has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1992. This is the Dominican Republic the resort wall hides.

The Drive West

You'll roll out of Punta Cana through open sugar-cane country until the capital's skyline appears. Then you're right in it — the traffic, the noise, the daily life of millions of Dominicans. It looks nothing like the beach, and that's the whole point of coming.

Inside the Colonial Zone

Most of the day happens inside the old fortified walls, in a quarter barely sixteen blocks across. Packed into it are the New World's firsts — and not replicas, the originals: the first cathedral, the first paved street, the first university, the first hospital, the first stone house, even the first tavern.

With your guide you'll walk Calle Las Damas, the first paved road laid anywhere in the New World; step inside the Catedral Primada de América, the first cathedral in the Americas; visit the Alcázar de Colón, the palace built for Columbus's son Diego; and pay respects at the National Pantheon, where the country buries its most honored citizens. There's free time, too, to shop and wander streets that have been lived on without a break for five centuries.

Beyond the Old Walls

A few of the day's stops sit outside the Colonial Zone:

  • Los Tres Ojos (Three Eyes) National Park — underground caves and lagoons the Taíno people relied on for a thousand years.
  • The Columbus Lighthouse (Faro a Colón) — the monument that holds Christopher Columbus's tomb.
  • The National Palace — the seat of the country's government.

Lunch

Somewhere in the middle of it all you'll sit down to a full plate of authentic Dominican food, served the way locals actually eat it.

A Little History, On the House

Those cannon-lined walls weren't decoration. Everyone wanted this city as a springboard for conquest — the campaigns into Mexico, Peru and Florida all sailed from here. Even the English privateer Sir Francis Drake helped himself, sacking Santo Domingo in 1586 and handing it back to Spain only after a small fortune in gold changed hands. That much is free; the rest of the city's five centuries take a proper narrated tour to draw out, which is exactly what your guide is for.

The Santo Domingo trip runs on select days only and seats sell out, so book early to lock yours in.

More than five hundred years after Columbus dreamed up this New World, you're still turning up to see it. Put on a hat and comfortable shoes — you'll walk the day European life in the Western Hemisphere began, eat where Dominicans eat, and head home actually understanding this country.

What's Included

  • Round-trip transportation
  • Professional guide
  • Lunch

What to Bring

  • Comfortable clothing
  • Comfortable shoes
  • Camera
  • Sunscreen
  • A hat
  • Cash

Good to know

  • Santo Domingo is roughly a 3-hour drive each way — it's a long day.
  • The cathedral enforces a dress code: shoulders and knees covered, for men and women alike.
  • You're usually collected from your hotel in a smaller van, then moved to a larger coach for the drive.
  • The gift-shop stop is optional — just tell your guide so they can set a meet-up time.