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The
Dominican Republic has three major
metropolitan areas.
Santo Domingo, on the southern
coast, is the capital, with a population of
two million people.
On the northern coast is Puerto
Plata, one of the country’s main tourist
resorts with some 60,000 year-round
residents.
Santiago, located in the central
highlands, is the country’s leading
industrial center, with a population of
well over quarter a million inhabitants.
Sosua, near Puerto Plata, and La
Romana and Punta Cana, at the eastern end
of the island, all have growing resort
populations.
The
rest of the nation’s six million plus
population live in or around a dozen or so
smaller towns and villages. If you have the opportunity of traveling through the
countryside you will notice that for a
country with an area of 19,000 square miles
the D.R. is sparsely populated,
particularly its eastern region.
The
island of Hispaniola was originally
inhabited by an estimated one million
Indians; they were annihilated in less than
a century by the Spanish conquerors.
Today, 70 percent of the Dominican
Republic’s population are mulattoes, the
result of extensive intermingling between
white European settlers and African slaves.
The remaining 30 percent are white,
black and Asians.
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