Where to stay in Santo Domingo

The Colonial Zone

The obvious answer gets it right: everything you came to see is here, you walk all of it, and there are small hotels built inside genuine colonial houses, with a courtyard, the original well and metre-thick walls. For what an ordinary room costs in the Caribbean you sleep in a sixteenth-century building.

And the best part is the one you don’t expect: it’s still a neighbourhood with people in it. There are colmados, women bringing chairs out to the pavement, children. They didn’t empty it out to show it off. The catch is the obvious one: El Conde is noisy until late, and in the most touristed corners dinner prices have stopped being Dominican.

Ask for a room facing an inner courtyard and it’s solved.

Gazcue

Pressed against the Colonial Zone on the west, between the old town and the Malecón, Gazcue is a residential quarter from the thirties and forties: low villas, big trees, quiet streets and not one tourist. It’s a fifteen-minute walk to the old town and five to the Malecón. It’s where you stay if you want to see how Santo Domingo’s middle class lives without giving up the distance. There are mid-sized hotels and apartments, dinner costs city prices rather than postcard prices, and at night you hear crickets instead of El Conde. The Plaza de la Cultura is here too, with the national museums, which almost nobody visits and which holds the Museo del Hombre Dominicano and the little that remains of the Taíno.

The Malecón

Along the fourteen kilometres of seafront are the big chain hotels, the casinos and the towers with Caribbean views. It’s where the business traveller and the conference delegate stay, and it works: big rooms, a pool, the sea in front.

Two honest warnings. One: there’s no beach here. The Malecón is an avenue with the sea breaking on the shore reef, and to swim you have to go to Boca Chica, half an hour away. Two: between your hotel and the water there are six lanes of traffic.

As a base for seeing the city, the Colonial Zone is better. As a place to be comfortable with a view, this.

Piantini and Naco

To the north, the city that isn’t in the photographs: apartment towers, offices, shopping centres and the capital’s best restaurants, which are here and not in the old town. It’s the Santo Domingo with eleven million people behind it rather than five hundred years.

There isn’t one touristic reason to sleep here and there is one practical one: if you came for work, this is where the work is. And if you’re back for a second or third time and you’ve done the Colonial Zone, eating here one night shows another face of the country, the one no feature ever covers. It’s twenty minutes from the old town if the traffic behaves, which is assuming a lot.