6:30 am
Hotel pickup
We collect you from your resort lobby in an air-conditioned vehicle and head west along the coast.
Where the Americas begin
The first city of a new world — and you can walk it in a day.
In 1496, Bartholomew Columbus founded Santo Domingo on the west bank of the Ozama River. It became the first seat of Spanish rule in the Americas — the place from which the conquest, the trade and the collision of worlds all radiated outward. Nowhere else can you stand on the exact ground where the modern history of the hemisphere began.
Today that ground is the Colonial Zone, a UNESCO World Heritage site of cobbled streets, coral-stone palaces and shaded plazas. The first cathedral, the first paved street, the first university and the first hospital of the New World are all here, within a few hundred metres of one another.
From your resort in Punta Cana it is a comfortable drive west — and a journey of five hundred years. Our small-group tour gives you a licensed guide who knows the stones by name, a traditional Dominican lunch, and the time to actually feel the place rather than rush it.
To walk Calle Las Damas is to walk the oldest street in the New World — laid in 1502, and still going.
