Dominican Republic - Short Info
Dominican Republic is a country located on the Hispaniola Island, and it shares this island with the poorest country in Western Hemisphere- Haiti. Dominican Republic has 60,000 km2 of area - which is enough to not get bored while living there and enough to - after living there for some time, even as tourist - have dominican friends in each city. The other countries close to Dominican Republic, but located on other Carribean islands are: Cuba, Puerto Rico and Jamaica - and DR's neighbours tells exactly about what kind of country/place we may expect. In two simple worlds that would be: "easygoing country".
As I said before, Dominican Republic is located on the eastern part of the Island Hispaniola. And exactly on this island, over 500 years ago landed Christopher Colon and his "gang"- in 1492, which is famous as year of "discovering America" by Old Continent - Europe. Unfortunately, that [read more, 70 % of content inside]
Hispaniola Island - La Isla Hispaniola - later in history was a witness and passive participant of wars between Colonial Empires of that times - Spain, France and England - exactly in the same way as whole Carribean region was. Europeans from France and Spain founded here sugar plantations - and they badly needed workers (slaves... !) for this job. So they brought in - in 100's of thousands - slaves from Africa, who quickly populated this Island and spread their DNA here, often mixing it with DNA of their "white masters".
Slavery existed on this Island until XIX century and we can say that it formed modern character of Dominican Republic and its black neighbour from the west - Haiti. These two countries became independent in the very same XIX century - and divided Hispaniola Island into two parts. Haiti - almost totally black and french speaking and Dominican Republic - Spanish speaking, with every possible color of its population - from white, through yellow (Chinese people), most frequent Mulatos (mix between black and white) and sometimes black, too.
And despite country's history facts - average modern Dominican citizen will never [read more, 80 % of content inside]
Most of the Dominicans are Mulato - skinned. This color of white coffee is a mix between Black and White and it says a lot about dominican past.