The Dominican Republic is an island nation occupying the eastern five-eighths of Hispaniola in the Caribbean Sea, sharing the island with Haiti to the west and a maritime border with Puerto Rico to the east.
Covering 48,671 square kilometres, it is the second-largest country in the Antilles after Cuba and home to approximately 11.4 million people, with 3.6 million concentrated in the capital, Santo Domingo. Indigenous Taíno peoples divided the island into five chiefdoms before Christopher Columbus landed in 1492, establishing the first permanent European settlement in the Americas. Spain ceded the western third to France in 1697; that territory became Haiti in 1804. The Dominican Republic won independence in 1844 after 22 years of Haitian rule, endured civil wars and dictatorship—most notably Rafael Trujillo’s regime from 1930 to 1961—and has pursued representative democracy since 1996. The country holds the largest economy in the Caribbean and the seventh-largest in Latin America, sustaining the fastest GDP growth in the Western Hemisphere between 1992 and 2018, averaging 5.3 per cent annually and driven by construction, manufacturing and tourism across its varied coastal and mountain terrain.
