Los Haitises is a national park on the southern shore of Samaná Bay, in the northeast of the Dominican Republic, where hundreds of rounded limestone hills topped with rainforest stand in the water and on the shore, threaded by boat through mangrove channels to sea caves that the Taíno painted a thousand years ago. The hills are mogotes, the remains of a limestone plateau dissolved by rain into humps and caves, and the boats leave Sabana de la Mar and weave the flat channels between them, close enough that the rock walls you in on both sides with frigatebirds and brown pelicans crowding the bare crags to nest overhead. Off the open channels the boats turn into the mangrove, where the trees close over the water and the pilot drops the engine to a crawl through tunnels of roots, and in the brackish shallows where fresh water meets the sea, West Indian manatees still browse, shy and easy to miss.
The caves are the reason the park is more than scenery. At San Gabriel and La Arena the guide's torch pulls whales, sharks, human faces and hunting scenes out of the dark, painted in charcoal and cut into the soft limestone by the Taíno, the people of the island before Columbus, who were gone within a century of his arrival; the whales they drew are the humpbacks that still fill Samaná Bay from January to March, just beyond the mangroves, and the boats to the caves pass the boats to the whales. The forested mogotes are the last natural stronghold of the Ridgway's hawk, of which fewer than about 500 survive anywhere, and the park holds most of the island's remaining lowland forest. The park is reached from Samaná town or Sabana de la Mar in a morning, and the caves are damp, dark and cool after the bay. Los Haitises is a bay full of hills with a gallery inside them, and the whales the painters saw are still coming.