It would be easy to spend a week in Punta Cana in January without once leaving the hotel grounds, and the weather makes a persuasive case for it. This is the drier half of the year on the Dominican Republic's eastern tip. The days are bright, the trade wind takes the edge off the afternoons, and when rain does come it tends to be a short shower that has moved on before anyone has finished gathering the towels. As a month for sun and warm sea it is hard to fault. Everyone else knows this too, so the resorts of Bávaro and Cap Cana are at their busiest and rooms are dearer. A week inside a wristband has its pleasures, though it teaches you very little about where you are.
Choose one stretch of coast and come to know it. Macao, north of the resort strip, is a public beach with no hotel in front of it, surf schools on the sand and a row of wooden shacks frying fish to serve with plantain, rice and beans. It has real waves, so learners should stay with the schools and swimmers should read the flags. Inland from the Puntacana resort, the Indigenous Eyes Ecological Park keeps a forest threaded with freshwater lagoons, several of them open for swimming and many carrying Taíno names that recall the island's first people. Resort guests can wander in; others generally come on a booked tour.
If you want one longer day out, Altos de Chavón stands above the gorge of the Chavón river near La Romana, a re-creation of a sixteenth-century Mediterranean village, amphitheatre and all, built in the late twentieth century. It is a stage set and does not pretend otherwise. Its archaeological museum, on the island's indigenous cultures, is a serious one, and worth the drive on its own.
On 21 January the country keeps the Día de la Altagracia, a national holiday for its patroness, whose sixteenth-century image of the Virgin hangs in the basilica at Higüey, a short drive inland. Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims come for the feast, many of them on foot to keep a promise. The basilica is a soaring modern arch of concrete, not the colonial stone you might expect. We would see it on a quieter day for the building, and on the feast itself only as onlookers, shoulders and knees covered, leaving the good places to those who walked.