Cotui: capital city of Sanchez Ramirez province.

Category:

General Tourism

Ecotourism

History

Location:

The province Sanchez Ramirez, with Cotui being its capital, limits on the north by the province Duarte (San Francisco de Macoris), east and south with the province of Monte Plata and on the west by the provinces Monseñor Nouel (Bonao) and La Vega.

About Cotuí:

Sanchez Ramirez province has an area of 1196.13 km ².

The name Cotui comes from the chief of the same name who was the chief deputy of the chieftainship of Magua Guarionex.

The mineral resources of the region are immense counting the iron deposits of Hatillo and Caballero, the marble quarries and gold of the Lagoons.

In arts, Cotui is the birthplace of painters and poets Juan Bravo and Lorgio Nunez.

The first baseball player signed as a professional pitcher on the Major League was Farilo Abreu of the decade of the 1960s. Currently the province has several pitchers and players in major leagues, including: Ramon Ortiz, Duaner Sanchez, Pedro Liriano, Wilton Abreu and Ronny Belliard.

Climate:

Cotui climate is a tropical forest and its temperature varies between 22 and 29 º C.

How to get there?

By Air: The nearest airport is the Cibao International Airport (STI) located in the province of Santiago, another nearby airport is the Las Americas International Airport (SDQ) in Santo Domingo.

By car: From Santo Domingo take the Northern route on Duarte highway turning right at Piedra Blanca.

Attractions:

Presa de Hatillo (Hatillo dam):

The Hatillo dam is six miles southwest of Cotuí municipality, capital of Sanchez Ramirez province and 113 kilometers northwest of Santo Domingo. Ecotourism in Sánchez Ramírez province has this dam as the main element, with the landscape of its more than 30 kilometers of navigable waterway.

Hatillo Dam is the largest dam in Central America and the Caribbean, which is supplemented by the appeal of the twenty-three Guacara Taino caves which are visited by a ferry with capacity for sixty people browsing around the mountains bordering the reservoir.

The dam construction was started in late 1970 and finished in the government of Salvador Jorge Blanco in 1984.

Immaculate Conception Parish Church:

The Immaculate Conception church was built in 1741, was part of the ecclesiastical monuments “Herreriano” style which emerged in the first and second quarter of the seventeenth century.

The parish church of Cotui remained for some 200 years, in 1926 a bell tower was built when the excavations were carried to their base, the workers found several bodies made skeletons, which were a sign that many years were buried there. This church was destroyed by an earthquake in 1946. In 1957, opened what is now the Immaculate Conception Church located on the central park of the city of Cotuí.

Cotui Carnival:

The carnival of Cotui is one of the oldest in the country: the diversity of its characters and their features tie this celebration to colonial times, because this town has just celebrated its fifth anniversary. This carnival although descended from Spain, due to Cotui being a mining town, here the first African slaves arrived, and them with their cultural influence permeated the Hispanic carnival with African customs.

The most important character of this carnival is the identity because it is “Papelus”. Other important characters are “El Platanus”, “El Murcielago” (The Bat), “El fundus”, “El Medio dia” (noon), “La culebra y los siete pecados” (The Snake and the seven deadly sins), Satan and Shorty and “El grande Tapado”.

Hoyo de Sanabe (Sanabe Hole):

The Hoyo de Sanabe is a cave that is crossing the lake of Hatillo Dam, about 30 minutes walking along a mountain path. Sanabe hole was known as the “guacara del Peñón de la sabana” (Guacara Rock of the savanna) before the construction of the dam.

According to archaeologists, it’s thought there's original locals worshiped nature sacrificing children 12 to 14 years, as found in an investigation, human skeletons of about this age. This cave also contains pictographs of great importance, like the Siamese, constituting the largest Taino pictographs murals detected so far in the country and near them a quadruped that some experts confirm that it is a jaguar, among other animals that adorn the walls of the Guacara known as the great Taino temple of the Island.

Guacara del Comedero Cave:

Guacara del Comedero is a cave that has some hieroglyphics on its walls that seem carved a chisel and cross-shaped maze, which archaeologists said it meant the rainy months of the Taino calendar. These caves are located in upon arrival at the foot of the Sierra Prieta in the town of Fantino.

The cave of Guacara del Comedero is one of the many cave-temples are scattered across the surface of the earth, and to make a study it surprises by the similarity of their registration with the inscriptions of the other caves that are in the Old Continent, dating from the Neolithic (polished stone) and Bronze Age.