Boca Chica

Boca Chica

Boca Chica is a municipality (municipio) of the Santo Domingo province in the Dominican Republic. Within the municipality there is one municipal district (distritos municipal): La Caleta.[5] As of the 2012 census it had 123,510 inhabitants, 70,184 living in the city itself and 53,326 in its rural districts (Secciones).[4] Boca Chica has a popular beach with the same name, located about 30 kilometers east of Santo Domingo de Guzmán in the south-east region of the country. The community of Boca Chica was founded in 1779 during the government of Brigadier Don Isidro Peralta y Rojas with the name of San José de los Llanos. Boca Chica was later developed by Dominican businessman and politician Juan Bautista Vicini Burgos, who established sugar plantations there in the early 1900s. Vicini was very fond of the place but the golden era of Boca Chica came decades later in the 1950s, when dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo ordered the construction of a modern hotel named "Hotel Hamaca", which subsequently became an icon in the area. The hotel became more famous after Trujillo granted political asylum to the dictator Fulgencio Batista after the Cuban Revolution. During the 1950s and the 1960s, prominent families of the Dominican Republic built several summer properties along the beach only accessible by private transportation.