10 / 10 · Destination
The first city of the New World.
The oldest city in the Americas — Santo Domingo, a UNESCO-listed Colonial Zone of cathedrals, fortresses and Caribbean rhythm. Aria's first address in the Caribbean.
1 hotel in Dominican Republic
Santo Domingo is not a Caribbean resort city. It is the first city of the New World — founded in 1498, five hundred years before Miami existed, six centuries before Punta Cana became a runway. Every stone in the Zona Colonial has a date on it: 1502, 1512, 1540. The oldest cathedral in the Americas is here. So is the first paved street, the first hospital, the first university. It is a place to walk slowly, in linen, with a rum on the rocks at the end.
Aria Santa Maria opens onto Calle Las Damas — that first paved street — inside a restored sixteenth-century building of coral limestone and colonial masonry. The city outside is one of the great walking capitals of the Caribbean: shaded plazas, ochre and rose façades, the sound of merengue drifting from an open window at four in the afternoon. Beyond the walls, the Malecón runs along the sea for seven kilometres, and the beaches of Boca Chica and Juan Dolio are forty minutes east.
Come for the history. Stay for the food, the music, and the specific quality of Dominican hospitality — unhurried, warm, and entirely unbothered by anyone's schedule.
Arrival
Direct flights from New York, Madrid and Frankfurt land at Las Américas International, thirty minutes from the Colonial Zone. We arrange a private transfer that delivers you straight to Calle Las Damas — cobbled, pedestrian, and closed to cars from the moment the sun goes down.
Heritage
The Catedral Primada de América was consecrated in 1541. The Alcázar de Colón, built for Diego Columbus, still stands at the end of Calle Las Damas. Fortaleza Ozama guards the mouth of the river as it has since 1502. Guided walking tours through the Zona Colonial are a two-hour lesson in the founding of the Americas — and, if you prefer, we send you with a historian rather than a guide.
The table
Dominican cooking is Caribbean with an African bass line: sancocho at long Sunday lunches, mangú with fried cheese and salami for breakfast, freshly caught grouper on the beach. The rum is exceptional (Barceló Imperial, Brugal 1888) and the cacao — from the Duarte and San Francisco de Macorís highlands — is some of the finest single-origin chocolate in the world.
The sea
Forty minutes east of the city, Boca Chica and Juan Dolio offer the calm, shallow, turquoise water the Caribbean is known for — without the wristbands. We arrange private day trips with a driver, a beach club table and a return in time for dinner in the Colonial Zone.
What to do
Nearby & notable
The hotels
1 in Dominican Republic