February 21, 2025

On today’s agenda, the Centro Cultural Eduardo León Jimenes followed by the botanical gardens. The Centro Cultural is an concave arced building whose exterior plaza is dotted with stately royal palms, its interior courtyard centering on a reception desk, leading in turn to an amply-stocked shop with all manner of unique and engaging bric-a-bric and of course the exhibits themselves.

The exhibition space on the main floor is dedicated to a combination of the natural environment, the Taíno, the historic indigenous people of the island of Hispaniola, and vignettes from the traditional life of Creole Dominicans. Outstanding is the quality of the presentation, both the quality of the curation and of the maintenance of the exhibition. Broken, tatty, out-dated, and dirty are definitely not in order here.

Vitrines show the variety of marine life found in the seas around Hispaniola, and adjacent, objects originating from millennia of the pre-Colombian presence in what is now the Dominican Republic, including instruments used for ceremonies, objects of veneration, mallets used for grinding starchy vegetables, canisters and pots, all made of stone.

As is the case throughout the Americas, the aesthetics specific to these people are quite unique and unusual, the relatively abstract corporeal representations typically exaggerating some parts of the body and minimizing others. Some of the pots on display are interesting as well, with ovoid characteristics rather than being perfectly rounded and unusual garish figurations on their mouths, somewhat reminiscent of the unusual shapes I saw in the works of the Calima peoples in the Valle de Cauca in Colombia.

The exhibits describing the contemporary Dominican peoples present powerful imagery of the tripartite and profoundly divergent influences that create this uniquely colourful Caribbean culture, including musical instruments, masks, pretty architectural detailing, of which I have seen so much in local urban environments, colourful kites, wood and gourd utensils, woven bags, stacks of the traditional yucca flatbread (that I am not a fan of), sponges, woven fibre hats and baskets, candles, flags, and religious paraphernalia.

Upstairs, the space is devoted entirely to visual art, mostly painting, but also sculpture. While the essential modern art could be considered derivative, the work – much of it dating back to the mid-60s – is roughly contemporary with the movements from which it would have received inspiration. While a predictable portion is of dubious value – certainly an assessment that could be applied to a lot of modern art, a lot does stand out for its relative originality, composition, use of colour, and aesthetic prowess. In the broader context of the exhibition space, I am not sure how culturally relevant a lot of the work would be, but I am hardly qualified to make that judgement.

The final display at the cultural centre is the elegant building across the grassy plot that acts as central courtyard, with its netted aviary holding nothing more than pigeons. Strewn across the gardens are abstract-style sculptures that are somewhat visually arresting in the context, not that there are many people milling about to even pay attention to the detailing of the outdoor space.

As an aside, it is worth mentioning that the mild weather is fantastic – very warm, but not excessively hot, with traces of clouds in the sky, without the threat of rain. Upstairs, two aisles of exhibits describing the lives of the family that sponsored the centre, each exhibit presenting images from some aspect of their lives, an office scene with the contemporary trappings of a commercial enterprise, displayed in a manner that is visually informative but also aesthetically pleasing.

The Centro Cultural may have a good restaurant, but I wonder what authentic treasures are located in this area. Viewing the map, it turns out that there is some variety, including a Chinese restaurant and an arepa place – Venezuelans have made it here as well! The Cocina De Doña Bruna across the street is the epitome of a Dominican eatery, the somewhat dour black matron eyeing me as she ladles pieces of stewed chicken onto a heaping plate of rice, adds a plate of the typical stewed beans to the tray, and sends me off into the rear of the cubbyhole eatery.

Various family members hold court in the establishment over excessively loud and heavily emotionally inflected conversation with the staccato rhythms that you would expect of a people from whom the sounds of merengue originate. The interaction between the people at the few tables is somewhere mesmerizing and the food absolutely fantastic – the Dominicans really know how to make simple foods incredibly tasty. It almost seems as if they have used some red spice for the chicken, such as annatto, which deviates somewhat from the typically local flavour profiles used for meats here. And yes, they have a habanero-based hot sauce, tasty but fiery. Homecooked food of this calibre also comes out far cheaper than the alternatives.

When the car finally drops me off at the botanical garden, it is completely unclear as to where I should be heading. A large visitor’s centre is being built near the parking lot, and beyond that, there seems to be a fair amount of construction. Further along, I see a thatch-roofed structure, walkways leading to what I take to be a butterfly sanctuary, an adjacent cafe, but nothing that looks like what I came here to see.

Circling the butterfly enclosure, I am greeted by excitable children, including young boys intent on showing me the toy gliders that they are happy to demonstrate for me when they are not distracted by the innumerable distractions that children experience. The butterfly sanctuary is closed – so that doesn’t seem to leave a lot of options to visit. Has coming here been for nothing?

A worker points me in the direction of a sign with a map of the botanical gardens, and then it becomes clear as to what the general layout is. The botanical gardens are essentially a long rectangle of terrain with a paved road that extends along its periphery in the form of a loop, with another paved road that extends along the centre of the length of the loop. The area near the entrance – where I am currently standing – contains facilities for the purpose of servicing the visitor’s needs that are not formally part of the gardens.

Side roads and trails lead into the adjoining green terrain to various attractions, but many of these attractions have been left unattended over time and have an abandoned feeling to them, presumably the object of the larger restoration project that the entire gardens face. Walking to the north, spectacular views are offered of the forest ranging to the north, the mountains beyond, and artfully-placed cumulus puffs somewhere on the horizon.

The attractions may seem unexceptional, but it is simply nice to walk peacefully in a parklike setting, straying along some trail or small alley to take note of a random feature of the garden that was of little import even when it was reasonably taken care of. There are few people around, and despite the paved status of the roads, almost no traffic whatsoever, nothing except the sprawling forest and endless blue sky above.

An abandoned, decaying army helicopter, a small pond enclosed in beds of reeds, apparently the place to see frogs, although I see nothing more than a handful of ducks, another set of small ponds that showcase a variety of mangrove plants, which seems somewhat confusing to me, as mangroves should only grow in saline marine environments.

At the far north end, the forest extends into a larger plot that may not be worth exploring, other than a small suspension bridge crossing the rio Jacagua, essentially a creek, whose banks are strewn with unsightly debris; on the south side of the road, a singularly unexceptional grove of bamboo, and then further to the south on the return, a decidedly memorable cactus grove.

What lends the environment a seductive beauty is the variety of flowering plants and trees, despite it being the dry season. Apricot, mauve, and rose bougainvillea, as expected; trailing ivory, marigold poppies, the cactus garden in particular a haven for exotic flowering plants, including pods of tiny crimson flowers of the alligator plant, lemon aloe vera, brilliant orange and yellow agave, rose nopal, white cotton, pale yellow logwood, the calotropis proceri’s ivory-and-mauve florettes that are so typical of drier tropical environments in southern Africa and Southeast Asia, and the stunning solitary bromeliad-style crimson-veined flower of the carrion plant.

Many of these flowers are found in the spectacular cactus garden, with its more common aloe, maguey, saguaro, but also less known exotics, such as devil’s backbone, with its narrow, spiney leaves extending from a central stalk, the stubby stalks of the carrion plant, prickly pear with its spine-laden stalk and crown of thick paddle-like leaves. All manner of palms are found in the gardens as well, such as fan palms, foxtail palms, coconut palms, and Bismarck palms.

What makes the cactus grove singular is the amount of flowering plants with wildly colourful blooms that attract copious amounts of camera-shy birds to their pollen. Wending slowly along the paths rising towards the crest of a hill immediately to the east of the cacti, I carefully train my camera on the exotic flowers and stalks of desert plants arrayed around me, the path culminating at a terraced concrete podium bearing an enormous cross with a rough-hewn Jesus, whose suffering belies the calm beauty of the immediate park, the stunning views of the environs of Santiago beyond the park, and the green mountains in the distance.

Closer to the entrance, varieties of birds, including pigeons, kestrels, jittery guinea fowl and a nervous limpkin, similar to but smaller than a heron. A disheveled plot with crumbling walkways weaves around shrubs and trees used for agricultural cultivation, including the common and less so, such as noni, ackee fruit, soursop, tamarind, cassava and cotton.

Sometimes travel days are far from memorable – today I had expected little, and yet the well-curated cultural centre and moments of natural serendipity of the botanic gardens have definitely made the day outstanding.