Salto El Limón is a waterfall of forty metres in the hills of the Samaná peninsula, in the northeast of the Dominican Republic, dropping in a white plume down an algae-green wall into a cold pool between boulders, ridden up to on horseback through cacao and coffee plots from the village of El Limón and swum in at the foot, in a rainforest that swallows the whole scene from the overlook above. The riders waiting at the trailhead are not a tour company but families, and the paradas at the roadside are their businesses, so the horse given to a visitor is somebody's working animal, led up the red-dirt trail of forty minutes by a boy on foot; the water lands cold and green in a pool ringed by boulders, and the swim goes to the base of the drop with the spray in the face, while a viewpoint above the falls shows the full scene at once, a slim white ribbon of water dropping into a hidden pool swallowed by unbroken canopy. In the dry months the plume breaks apart into dozens of thin threads combing down the green wall and the pool turns clear turquoise, and at the peak of the wet season, when the station at Samaná averages 261 millimetres in November alone, the fall is at its widest and loudest.
The ridges of the peninsula are marble and schist rather than the limestone that makes most of the coast, rock that came back from the deep in the collision that built the island, and the fall drops over the edge of it. El Limón was made a protected natural monument in 1996, but the boundary drawn on the map stopped short of the headwaters that feed the fall. The peninsula around it is the coast of the humpbacks that come to Samaná bay to calve from January to March, and the falls are done on the same trip. Salto El Limón is a waterfall reached on someone's horse, and the family at the bottom owns the trail.