Salto El Limón stopped falling in the summer of 2019. The waterfall that draws up to 70,000 visitors a year — a forty-metre drop into a green pool below the village of El Limón — thinned to a wet stain on the rock, and the families who live off it watched their income vanish. The fault lay upstream. The Arroyo Chico, the stream that makes the fall before it joins the Río Limón, rises in forest on the Sierra de Samaná, and that forest had been cleared for cattle. Trees here do more than hold the rain: they comb moisture out of the trade winds coming off the Atlantic, so a bare ridge lets the water pass overhead. Eight nearly rainless months finished the job. The fall had been a protected natural monument since 1996, and the cliff it drops over is not the limestone of the coast but the old metamorphic rock the whole peninsula is built from.
The way in has not changed in decades. Riders from the village lead horses and mules up a red-dirt track through cacao and coffee plots, and the last stretch down to the water is on foot whichever way you come. You hear the fall before you see it, and the spray finds you before the pool does. The water lands cold and green between boulders, and the cliff behind runs gold and green where algae hold on in the permanent wet. It flows again today: native trees are going back into the cleared headwaters, and it is fullest from September to November, when Samaná takes its heaviest rain. But it is not out of danger — after a long dry spell the water still drops to a trickle, and in the worst years it stops.