2. República Dominicana

3. The Dominican Republic today has a population of approximately 9 million people, the majority of whom are criollos, a biological mixture of Indians, Europeans and Africans; the official census lists the population as being 73% mixed, 16% white, and 11% black. It is an urban nation (61% of the Dominican population lives in an urban environment) with an 80% literacy rate. Approximately 2 million Dominicans live in the capital city of Santo Domingo de Guzmán. Population

4. History Geography Famous People Gastronomy TraditionsArchitecture

5. The island’s first peopling—The first people to inhabit what would one day be the Dominican Republic were small groups of fishermen, hunters and gatherers, a simple Stone-Age people, who arrived via canoe sometime between 5,000 BC and 4,000 BC, fully 5,500 to 6,500 years before the arrival of Europeans. These earliest “Indians,” as Columbus would later call them, are known to archaeologists and historians as the Guanahatabey (or Ciboney) people.

6. Since the signing of the Treaty of Ryswick between the kingdoms of Spain and France in 1697, the island of Hispaniola (La Isla Española) has played host to two separate and distinct societies that we now know as the nations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

7. Columbus was a royal governor of the Dominican Repulic in 1499. He wanted to end serious abusesand taxation of settlers.

9. The earliest Spanish settlement was the Isabels which had huts and plazas...