🌍 Travel: What Las Terrenas, Dominican Republic Is Actually Like — A Month-Long Honest Review
We arrived with 7 suitcases, 3 people, and two of those suitcases were for one gaming desktop. The town didn't blink. That's Las Terrenas.
Italian panaderia in Playa Las Ballenas, Las Terrenas. July 2022.
THIS POST MAY CONTAIN AFFILIATE LINKS, MEANING I GET A COMMISSION IF YOU DECIDE TO MAKE A PURCHASE THROUGH MY LINKS, AT NO COST TO YOU.
The drive from Santo Domingo to Las Terrenas crosses the entire island of Hispaniola. The first hour leaving the capital is gritty and chaotic, the kind of drive that makes you question your decision-making. Then the road climbs into a mountain range — and everything changes. Suddenly, I was on something that reminded me of the winding road to Muir Beach and Stinson Beach in Marin County, California. Dramatic peaks, astonishing views of the ocean appearing between the trees like something you weren't supposed to see.
We arrived on a Friday night. Music was everywhere. ATVs tore through the streets. And the motoconchos — scooters — were ALL OVER THE PLACE. The way they drive and how many there are, you spend the first ten minutes wondering how they don't crash every two minutes. (I never did figure it out.)
We stopped at the market for water and mosquito repellent. Not a US market — more like the ones I've seen in Ambergris Caye, Belize, in Panama, in Costa Rica, in Mexico. Certain parts of Puerto Rico too. The non-sanitized, non-fluorescent-lit, real-life kind.
We were exhausted. We had a lot of luggage — 7 suitcases for 3 people. Two of those suitcases were entirely for Jovan's gaming desktop. I know. As my oldest, Tristan, would say: "first world problems." We're moving at the same time we're vacationing, and until I get the boy a gaming laptop, the desktop goes where we go.
Where We Stayed — Three Very Different Options
I booked Hotel Villas Las Palmas Del Mar through Booking.com for the first week — villas steps from the beach. International staff (Argentinian, Italian, Haitian, Dominican), someone always at the desk, an attendant at night. Kind in a way that went beyond job description. When my daughter needed to book a taxi after we'd already checked out and moved on, Las Palmas arranged it for her anyway. They didn't owe us that. They did it because that's who they are.
This being my fifth country to travel to, I know that what you read in descriptions — and what you see in videos — can look completely different in real life. That's why I decided to try different places instead of committing to one for the entire month. Because of my two chitlins (you'll get used to me calling my kids that), I wanted options in case somewhere didn't work out.
It was worth the extra cost. All three places taught me something different about this town.
The second place was a casita owned by a French couple who had been living in Las Terrenas for 23 years. They built their home on a loma — a hill — and rented out casitas around their property. We added the wife's meals: breakfast and dinner, both French and Italian. Creative and delicious. A welcome change from the Dominican food we had happily overdosed on during week one.
The third and final place was Clave Verde, an ecolodge further from town. After two weeks in the middle of everything, the quiet felt like a gift. I chose it specifically because it had a gym. Working out is Jovan's zen. It makes him happy. A happy Jovan is a better travel companion, and at 15, that math matters.
The Thing Nobody Told Me About Safety
I am a woman traveling with my kids. Safety is not a footnote — it's the whole equation.
In Las Terrenas, multiple locals told me they sleep with their doors unlocked. That people walk the streets at 3am with no worry. Not one person, not two — several, independently, said the same thing. "Things do happen from time to time," one man added. "No place is perfect." But this particular man, who had given Jovan and me a ride home when the bus was full, told me they could offer him villas y castillas — a world of riches — in Santo Domingo, and he still wouldn't leave Las Terrenas to live there.
A taxi driver said it even more simply: "*The only way I leave here is by being dragged out.*"
That ride home from a stranger, by the way — my sister's reaction was "a stranger's car again?!" She's not wrong that it sounds alarming in the abstract. But Las Terrenas is exactly that kind of town. When the bus is too full to take you, the car behind it offers you a ride. That's not naivety. That's community.
Getting Around — What It Actually Costs
Once I figured out the local buses — minivans running every 20 minutes across the area — I stopped overpaying. The ride from the ecolodge into town runs 50 to 75 Dominican pesos. About 15 to 25 minutes.
Before I figured that out, I was taking motoconchos, which are fun but charge tourists anywhere from 100 to 400 pesos. My last motoconcho ride — from a restaurant in town back to Clave Verde — was at the top end of that range. Live and learn.
The Town Itself
Las Terrenas is small but deeply international. Dominicans and foreigners both vacation here, which shows up in the food: Dominican, French, Italian, Spanish — all in the same small stretch of town. Everyone smiles. Everyone says hello. Very laid back.
There were very few days out of our 30 there that we didn't go to the beach. I'm the type who can spend hours and hours in the water. I become a fish.
It is a really safe town. It is a really beautiful town. And it is the kind of town that reminds you there are still places in the world where life is genuinely good — where nobody is in a hurry, and the people who live there chose it, again and again, over everything else.
As I told one of the drivers on our way out: "It's nice we still have places like this in the world."
He agreed.
