Puerto Plata Travel Guide

Caribbean

I landed in Puerto Plata at 4am with my fingers resting on the door latch of a stranger's car, seatbelt already unbuckled, ready to jump if the driver missed the last turn. That is not how the brochures sell the Amber Coast. But it is how my weekend here began, and it turned into one of the most intense travel experiences I have ever had before I even reached the hotel. The place that greeted me at that hour happens to be one of the oldest European footholds in the Americas, the spot where Columbus first laid eyes on this coastline in 1493. I came for a scuba certification. I left with a much larger story.

The Getting There Reality

Our flight from JFK to Puerto Plata was delayed for hours, so I spent the air time finishing the online coursework for my PADI Open Water certification. We touched down at 4am and immediately hit a wall: no ride. A woman from our flight found us at the terminal, and when she heard we had nothing arranged, she was alarmed. She told us plainly that it was not safe to be out here at this hour, and offered two options: wait at the airport until daybreak, or let her family drop us at the local bus station, where the first bus left at 7am. My dive class started at 8am in Sosúa, so waiting was not an option.

We spent the next hour and a half trying to get an Uber. The airport is set up so that curbside pickups are hit or miss, and cars kept arriving with plates that did not match the app, including the one we finally climbed into. Within a minute of pulling away, the driver phoned his English-speaking brother, who asked us to switch off the Uber app and pay cash instead. The app was our only way to track the ride, so we refused. We had already mapped the route and knew there were three turns that led to our hotel. He blew past the first. He blew past the second. If he missed the third, we would be heading toward the Haitian border. He took it, and I have rarely felt relief like that. We reached the hotel at 7am, which gave me exactly one hour of sleep before class.

The lesson is simple and worth more than any of the history below: arrange your airport transfer in advance, through your hotel or resort. Rideshare access at the airport is unreliable, and a 4am arrival is the wrong time to be improvising. Book the pickup ahead, and Puerto Plata is easy. Wing it, and you get my night.

A Port Named by Columbus

Christopher Columbus sailed into this bay in January 1493, on the same first voyage that opened the Americas to Europe. He named the cloud-wrapped peak behind the town Monte de Plata, "Silver Mountain," for the silvery mist that permanently caps it. There was never any real silver. The name stuck anyway, and the settlement below became Puerto Plata, the Silver Port. The town itself was established in the early 1500s, which makes it one of the oldest European settlements in the New World.

Almost nothing survives from that first century, because Spain deliberately razed and depopulated the town in the early 1600s to stamp out rampant pirate smuggling. The one exception still stands guard over the harbor: Fortaleza San Felipe, commissioned in 1564 and finished in 1577, named for King Philip II of Spain. It is one of the oldest surviving European forts in the Americas and the only building left from 16th-century Puerto Plata. Today it is a small museum, but the real reward is the structure itself and its position on the seawall point, with the Atlantic on three sides.

The Amber Coast

Puerto Plata anchors what Dominicans call the Amber Coast, and the name is literal. The hills around the city hold some of the finest amber on Earth, fossilized tree resin, an estimated 15 to 20 million years old, often with prehistoric insects frozen inside. The Dominican Republic is also the world's main source of rare blue amber, which glows an electric blue under direct sunlight.

The trade here is ancient, but it went global in 1993. Jurassic Park built its entire premise on DNA pulled from a mosquito trapped in amber, and the film's opening mining scene is set in the Dominican Republic. Puerto Plata's Amber Museum still displays a replica of the amber-topped cane carried in the movie. The museum is worth it for the building alone: a canary-yellow Victorian mansion with gingerbread trim, a leftover from the tobacco boom of the late 1800s that left Puerto Plata with one of the Caribbean's richest collections of Victorian architecture.

The Only Cable Car in the Caribbean

Rising directly behind the city is Mount Isabel de Torres, and the way up is a genuine one-of-a-kind: the Teleférico Puerto Plata is the only aerial cable car in the entire Caribbean, running since 1975. The ten-minute ride climbs roughly 800 meters to the summit, where a Christ the Redeemer statue stands with arms open, a smaller cousin of the famous one in Rio. What most visitors do not realize is what the statue sits on. The base is a former fortress from the Trujillo dictatorship, once fitted with anti-aircraft guns to watch the entire coastline. Around it spread botanical gardens and a scientific reserve. Go early, before the mist rolls in and swallows the view.

Diving Sosúa, and the Holocaust History Beneath It

My reason for coming was the water. The dive sites off Sosúa, about 20 minutes east, were incredible. Rough ocean swells shut down our second day of open-water dives, so instead we dropped into a cenote, one of the flooded limestone sinkholes that riddle the north coast, which turned out to be the highlight of the trip.

Here is the part almost no diver floating above the reefs knows. The town of Sosúa exists because of the Holocaust. At the 1938 Evian Conference, where 32 nations gathered to discuss the flood of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany, the Dominican Republic was the only country that agreed to take them in large numbers, offering space for as many as 100,000. In the end only around 700 refugees made it, and they built an agricultural settlement right here at Sosúa starting in 1940. Their dairy cooperative became a lasting Dominican brand, and a small synagogue still stands in town. The dictator Rafael Trujillo who issued the invitation had cynical motives, including rehabilitating his image after his 1937 massacre of Haitians, but the refuge was real, and for those 700 people it was the difference between life and death.

One honest note on Sosúa today: it is a great dive base by day, but the town's nightlife skews a certain direction, and there are some rough characters around after dark. Unless you are there for your own specific reasons, most travelers are better off basing themselves in Puerto Plata proper and one of its resorts, and treating Sosúa as a day trip to the water.

Getting Home Was Its Own Saga

Here is the detail I left out: we flew this entire trip standby, because my sister-in-law worked for an airline at the time. Standby is a beautiful thing right up until it isn't. On the way home, it wasn't. We could not get a seat on a single flight back to New York, and we both had to be at our desks Monday morning. Waiting, once again, was not an option.

The problem was that every last-minute flight into NYC was priced like a small ransom. So we did the only thing that made the math work: we booked a cheaper flight into Montreal instead, rented a car, and drove roughly six hours south, across the Canadian border, all the way back to New York. The trip that started with a white-knuckle ride from the airport ended with an unplanned road trip through another country. If you ever fly non-revenue standby, build in a buffer day, or at least a backup plan for getting home. Sometimes that plan is a rental car and an international border.

Where to Stay

Base yourself in Puerto Plata and its resort strip rather than in Sosúa. You get the beaches, the historic center, and the malecón, without the after-dark edge. If you want a taste of the local product while you are here, Brugal has been distilling rum in Puerto Plata since 1888, and the factory tour is an easy afternoon.

Puerto Plata gave me a certification, a cenote dive I did not plan, a 4am arrival I will never forget, and a drive home from Montreal I never intended to take. Save this before your trip, book the airport transfer, and follow along for the firsthand version of the rest of the Caribbean.