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Santo Domingo

 

Santo Domingo

We start visiting the ancient fortifications.

 

A riverside cafe in front of the olympic stadium (east side, second point on the map of Santo Domingo).

Santo Domingo

You've to go there on sunday afternoon, around 6 p.m. Concerts and ambience very typical.,...great. But there're no tourists (except us, as always). Thanks to Francis Rodriguez for the amazing concert concert. A real heaven for those who like merengue. The best was the show of a 70 or 80 y.o. "young boy": he made dance a young girl as a god. They really have the rithme inside...Hard, hard to be on the same level !

Then, a night walk and some pics of the area of the cathedral and the streets around.

Square of the Christophe Colomb cathedrale

Tha cathedral by night

 

Here's the street where our boarding house was located. Be careful to the "advices" of the guides (real or not) you meet in the street: they can bring you into some places completely unknown from the guides.When we arrived in Santo Domingo, a guide offers to help us fnding the boarding house we had already chosen and to show us also another one which was on the same way.
Firstly he brought us in a horrible place, with a stinking smell. I think that the room was closed for 1 year ! As he realized we didn't like it, he said that the house we had chosen had changed name and he brought us there.
We discovered that the name of the street as well had changed!!! So we decided to search it by ourselves, trying to find the house we wanted since the beginning. And after 3 minutes, we found it ...

and the room was absolutely agreeable.

The central pedestrianized street. There're no nice restaurants around, just some fast foods.

 

The commercial area : some little itinerant traders settle in front of the official shops. You'll also find a pizza man which stays on the pavement with all its material...

 

The square where's the house of the son of Christopher Columbus

The relief for the guard in front of the flame of the Unknown Soldier in the jesuit church. This one is in the "ladies' street" close to the french Embassy.

 

The presidential palace

A statue in the university campus of Santo Domingo. The gardens are really nice and perfect to have walks inside.

 

Following the coast, you can have the possibility to see this little track of bike-cross. Anyway, the children really have fun playing there. It happens sometimes that they don't turn well and so they finish in the scenery...

Santo Dominguo is next to the sea, so many restaurants there have a view on the sea. Talking about quality, we saw some wonderful crayfishes really appetizing !

 

The other proud of Santo Domingo: this awful building which ruins the view on the city centre. And because it overhangs the city, there's no way not to see it. And honestly, at the beginning we thought it was a huge factory, but in reality it's the museum of Christopher Columbus (it's cross-shaped if you see it from the top).

 

How can arrive to Santo Domingo, leaving from the Dominican Bay hotel in Boca Chica ?

To arrive there take the guaguas (local buses); they very comfortable, and often they have also the air conditioning. You can catch them in 3 different places :
- in front of the church, wait on the main square of the city. They stop everytimes and because you'll surely look like a tourist searching for a bus, they'll surely contact you. Say just "Santo Domingo"; if he goes there, he 'll tell you to get inside.
- on the motorway (on the left, at the end of the road if you're just going out from the commercial centre of the Dominican Bay ). To take a guagua, you just have to wait at the side of the street. Because they're not full they stop each times they see somebody waiting in the street)...
- or along the street of the beach. We didn't try this last solution.

To go there you need to change bus, but to come back they'll leave you directly at the entrance of the Boca Chica if you've taken a bus which goes further. No problem, the city centre is straight on, at the end of the street. The first time, when they left us at the side of the motorway they surely realized we're feeling a bit lost. ! But the Dominican Bay (our hotel) was just at 3 minutes walking distance.