More Images History of the Dominican Republic
The recorded history of the Dominican Republic began in 1492 when Christopher Columbus, working for the Crown of Castile, arrived at a large island in the western Atlantic Ocean, later known as the Caribbean. The native Taíno people, an Arawakan people, had inhabited the island during the pre-Columbian era, dividing it into five chiefdoms. They referred to the eastern part of the island as Quisqueya, meaning 'mother of all lands.' Columbus claimed the island for Castile, naming it La Isla Española, which was later Latinized to Hispaniola. Following 25 years of Spanish occupation, the Taíno population in the Spanish-controlled regions of the island drastically decreased due to the Taíno genocide. With fewer than 50,000 survivors, those remaining intermixed with Spaniards, Africans, and others, leading to the formation of the present-day tripartite Dominican population. Wikipedia