A small fishing village on the south-east coast that became the diving centre of the Dominican Republic, and the place almost every boat to Isla Saona leaves from.
The diving is the best in the country: wrecks sunk deliberately as reefs, notably the St George, a 73-metre freighter lying upright in 40 metres, and the shallow coral inside the Parque Nacional del Este, whose reefs are in better shape than most in the region because the park has kept the fishing out. There are caves too — the flooded cenotes inland and the caverns on Saona with Taíno pictographs on the walls.
The village keeps enough of itself to be pleasant: a working beach with boats pulled up on it, a handful of restaurants, and none of the scale of the resorts along the road to Punta Cana. Boats to Saona leave in the morning and come back mid-afternoon; going on a weekday makes a considerable difference to how many of them there are.