Los Haitises keeps its strangest treasure inside its sea caves: charcoal drawings of whales and sharks that the Taíno painted on the rock long before Columbus reached Hispaniola — and the same whales still winter in the bay just outside. The name comes from the Taíno word for highland or mountain range, and it fits the hundreds of rounded limestone hills, called mogotes, that rise straight from the water with rainforest matted over their backs. Millions of years of rain and sea have carved this Miocene limestone into a maze of caverns, arches and sinkholes where the land breaks into Samaná Bay. The Dominican Republic set the whole labyrinth aside as a national park in 1976, and to keep it intact you can reach it only by boat, with a licensed guide, in numbers the park deliberately holds down.
Getting in feels like slipping backward in time. Boats glide across the flat green water between the mogotes, then duck into mangrove tunnels where red-mangrove roots arch overhead and the engine falls to a murmur. Inside the coastal caves a guide's light picks out the old art — whales, faces and hunting scenes in charcoal and carving, some more than a thousand years old — while bats shift in the dark above. Out on the crags, brown pelicans and frigatebirds crowd the stone to nest, and herons stalk the shallows below. The park hides a rarer resident too: this is the last real stronghold of Ridgway's hawk, one of the most endangered birds of prey on Earth, found here in greater numbers than anywhere else. From January to March, humpbacks fill the sea beyond the mangroves, closing a circle the Taíno drew on these walls centuries ago.