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Roaming around by foot in Santiago, Dominican Republic at night. Not many tourists come to this part of the DR, so this is a glimpse of an actual genuine Dominican nightlife. This video is from February 22, 2022.
If you are asking yourself why most people seem young, that's not just due to this being the nightlife. Remember the average age in the DR is around 28 years old (plus or minus a few). By comparison, in the US it must be high 30's or low 40's.
April 15, 2022
Good Friday - Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
Here is a tour driving around Santo Domingo on Good Friday 2022. Most residents of the capital leave the city to either vacation at resorts by the beach or hotels in locals vacation spots, head inland to their parents/grandparents home and/or form part of the religious processions. Many also go and visit rivers (areas conditioned to spend a day, not going to any random spot in any river) and/or visit for one day some attraction or point of interest. Most however spend the time at their parents or grandparents homes where the entire or a large part of the extended family congregates. Some arrive from abroad with the purpose of being there with their extended families.
Anyway, this holiday is so big and important that hardly anything is open and, as can be seen in the video (which is in Spanish) a city that often is filled with traffic and traffic jams appears empty by comparison.
The guy sticks to Santo Domingo city proper which is the National District, though Greater Santo Domingo extends much further and is the most populated area in the Caribbean. He does go through all types of neighborhoods.
February 28, 2022
Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic
This was videotaped from a coach bus arriving to Santiago from Santo Domingo. The road was intervened (the current government has been doing some improvements, expanding traffic capacity and making the road safer to the entire length of the Duarte Highway or RD-1 which is the busiest highway in the DR), as can be seen, but it's noticeable where Santiago city begins. The dity government has done a good job at giving maintenance to Santiago's roads, parks and public places.
The Santiago area is the second most populated area in the DR and the most populated inland area in the Caribbean.
What about people horseback riding such as these in Dominican Republic near Puerto Plata (north coast). The video is in Spanish, but everyone can see the scenery and how cristal clear is the river. This was in December 2021.
This video was done in December 2021 driving through normal day-to-day streets in Santo Domingo. There is truly nothing of interest to tourists along this route. Anyway, on Google Earth I marked in blue the route taken starting on top. You would had driven this same route a good 20 to 30 years ago and there was mostly single family homes with no residential mid-rises and high-rises. The streets weren't as clogged with traffic as they are now either. How things change. This appears it was during a normal weekday.
To compare, this was the same city in 1987. The first notable thing is the lack of cars in the streets and the visible lack of commercial signs. The DR was a much poorer country back then, so consumption was much less and businesses weren't as much as now. There are other things that aren't visible in the video such as the lack of many things found today in the typical Dominican home and that young Dominicans take for granted mostly because things were always how they are now. Much more importantly is that most young Dominicans have no idea how much the country has changed in such a short time, in this case 1987 vs 2021. The DR back then was simply a country where most comfort stuff were not available. It didn't mater if you were the richest person in the world living in the DR, there wasn't many places to spend your money and as said before, even if you wsnted something chances were it didn't exist anywhere in the country. Today most comforts are available, you just need the money. Modern supermarkets were few and extremely few outside Santo Domingo and even in the capital they were known as "ghost houses" because very few people were their clients, gondolas were not well stocked not just in the variety of things, but many had large sections that were empty. Not the case today. Hardly anyone had csble TV (most people didn't have a TV for starters), telephone service was not widespread, many places were not connected to the electrical grid. To put it simply life in the DR was boring and sucked. lol On the other side, everywhere in the DR was very safe. Today there are some neighborhoods in major cities known as "barrios calientes" where you have to keep alert and eyes open at all times. Overall most places are less safe today but not so unsafe you can't have a normal life, but these types of neighborhoods are best avoided unless you live there. The middle class was very tiny and almost all of it was in Santo Domingo. Unlike today, and that is the reason why now there is so much contrast everywhere, back then if you were Dominican you were either rich or poor. The average rich wasn't as rich as the average rich of today, but the average poor was much poorer than the average poor of today. The middle class has grown a lot and expanded into medium cities and towns outside Santo Domingo, a large segment composed of families that in the 1980's were poor and moved up. Of the modern middle class I would say roughly 60% are new families that moved into that segment and the rest traditional middle class families that have been there for generations. Of the rich, it appears around 70% are new rich and the rest traditional rich with maybe 100 families (large ones including cousins, not the nuclear family of parents and their kids) are the people that have been rich "forever" or colonial times. Among the poor, not only has the percentage declined through these decades, but the average standard of living of the poor today would had been unthinkable in the 1980's, but still to be poor in the DR means living with less than the poor equivalent in the USA, but the gap has shrunk. One of the hallmarks was that it was common in poor neighborhoods to see young kids with overblown bellies due to malnutrition while today that is not the norm.
The "fever" that now exist with Americans, Canadians and some Europeans moving to the DR didn't exist in the 1980's. Most expats found today in places like Sosúa, Punta Cana, etc would had never done the move if the DR was as bsckwards today as it was in the 1980's. Especially considering that the places expats tend to go are for the most part tourist areas where certsin amenities or comforts still are lacking, but today reaching the parts of the DR where these things are available is quite easy making expat life more feasible. That's another difference between the DR of today and the one of the 1980's. There were hardly any highways with a median and the quality even of these roads tended to be bad. I remember it used to take more than 3 hours to go from Santo Domingo to Santiago on a two lane road (one lane per direction) and passing through the streets of every town and village along the way. Now 1:45 with 2 hours tops if you take your time. Times have changed.
There are hundreds of similar such videos of people walking around Lima and other parts of Peru, but, since I'm here right now, I'll post from where I am. I'm just one block for the light tower that you'll get glimpes of.
The Dominican Republic is somewhere like 75%-80% urban, so most of the population lives in these urban centers. Moca is to the right of Santiago, in fact most airplanes departing from the Cibao International Airport fly over Moca a mere seconds or minutes after departing regardless where it's going. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books...FB2ADE3216421C
* Tourists areas tend to be included in the rural figures due to the low population in most those places. Collectively they make up something like 1%-2% of the total population. The most visited part of the DR by international tourists is the Punta Cana/Bavaro areas which are to the north and south of the most esstern tip of the island. If you ever go to the Dominican Republic, I'll say there is over 90% chance that's where you are going. Other tourists areas are Las Terrenas on the Samana Peninsula (largest peninsula in the northeast), Sosúa/Cabarete (east of Puerto Plata), Bayahibe (east of La Romana), Juan Dolio (between Boca Chica and San Pedro although this is now more of a Dominican beach destination since Dominican tourists and weekenders tend to outnumber foreign tourists most of the time), Boca Chica itself, and finally Santo Domingo which is more of a business tourist destination than a leisure tourist destination, although its Colonial Zone do get many tourists arriving on tours especially from Punta Cana). There are other tourist destinations in the DR, but they tend to be more Dominican vacation/weenkend/holiday places.
Notice how not a single international leisurely tourist destination has enough population to have a singlr bar in the map. Basically, what this means is that Moca is more representative of the DR than the immediate area of most tourist destinations judging by population density. lol
Below are the international leisure tourist destinations I added and highlighted in yellow. The common denominator with all of them is that they have a beach.
Last edited by AntonioR; 09-30-2022 at 01:52 PM..
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