Santo Domingo: the Zona Colonial, merengue and the malecón

The old quarter is small — you can cross it in twenty minutes — and its pleasure is textural rather than monumental. The streets are narrow and paved in pale limestone, the buildings are low and heavy-walled with deep window reveals and interior courtyards, and the whole grid runs down to the Ozama river where the ground drops away to the water. The chronology, stated once and then left alone: the settlement dates from 1498, the cathedral is the earliest surviving one in the Americas, and a number of the stone buildings around it are of the same period, including the Alcázar, which now houses a museum of furnishings and objects. The Calle las Damas, running along the eastern edge, is the best single street to walk. What lifts the district above a heritage set is that it never became one: the same blocks hold schools, corner shops, barbers and workshops, and in the evening the Plaza de España fills up along the terrace above the river while the Parque Colón takes the domino players and the shoe-shiners. Come out after dark rather than at midday — the stone holds the day's heat, and the quarter is fundamentally a night-time place.

Both of the Dominican Republic's musical exports were born on this island and neither is a museum piece. Merengue is the older and faster — two-beat, accordion, tambora drum and the metal güira scraper — and it is the music of parades, political rallies, weddings and any street party of sufficient size. Bachata came later out of the countryside, guitar-led and slower, was long looked down on in the capital and then conquered the world; it is now inscribed on UNESCO's intangible heritage list and is what most people outside the country actually mean when they say Dominican music. The way to encounter both is not a show. It is the colmado — the corner shop that sells rice, beer and phone credit and puts speakers on the pavement — and the plazas of the Zona Colonial at the weekend, where the dancing is unselfconscious and social rather than performed. If you want a floor, the old quarter has long-running places where locals dance bachata properly and are entirely unbothered by beginners; the etiquette is simply to ask, and to accept that everyone present dances better than you.

The Dominican Republic produces more major-league baseball players per head than anywhere on earth, and the game occupies a place in national life closer to a civic institution than a pastime. The professional winter league runs from roughly October to January, and the capital's stadium is the place to understand it: the crowd is loud from the first pitch, there are drums and horns in the stands, dancers between innings, and beer and food circulating constantly. It is a genuinely different spectacle from the North American version — closer to a football terrace in atmosphere — and it is inexpensive and welcoming to outsiders. Even outside the season the game is visible everywhere: children play it on any flat ground with improvised equipment, and the academies that the major-league clubs run across the country are a serious industry. If your visit falls in the winter months, going to a game is the single best evening available in Santo Domingo, and it will tell you more about the country than any museum.

West of the old quarter the city turns to face the sea along the malecón, a seafront boulevard running several kilometres with the Caribbean on one side and the city on the other. There is no beach here — the shore is rock and the water comes up hard against it — so the malecón functions as promenade, running track, meeting place and, on weekends and during carnival, as an open-air venue for very large crowds. It is where the city takes its evening air. At the eastern edge of town, past the Ozama, Los Tres Ojos is worth an hour: a park over a collapsed limestone cave system where three open-roofed sinkholes hold still, startlingly clear lagoons at the bottom of vegetated shafts, with a small hand-pulled raft connecting one chamber to another. For actual swimming you leave the city — Boca Chica and Juan Dolio, both within an hour east along the coast, are the capital's own beach days, shallow and protected by reef, and are where Santo Domingo goes on a Sunday rather than where tourists are taken.

Dominican cooking is its own thing and rewards ordering locally rather than defensively. Breakfast is mangú: green plantains boiled and mashed to a smooth purée, topped with pickled red onion, and in its full form served as los tres golpes — the three hits — with fried cheese, salami and egg. The everyday lunch is la bandera, the flag: rice, stewed beans and a piece of meat, with a salad and fried plantain, eaten in the middle of the day when it is too hot to do much else. The dish that matters most socially is sancocho, a thick stew of several meats and root vegetables that takes hours and is what a family cooks when everyone is coming; it appears on menus but is fundamentally a home dish. Around the edges: fried snacks from street carts, superb cacao and coffee grown in the interior, tropical fruit, and mamajuana, a spiced rum-and-wine infusion steeped over bark and herbs that every bar makes slightly differently. The colmado is the institution that ties it together — part shop, part bar, part social centre, open late, with plastic chairs on the pavement.

Las Américas International (SDQ) sits east of the city with a straightforward road into the centre, and a second, smaller airport lies closer in. Santo Domingo has something unusual for the Caribbean: a modern metro, clean, cheap and air-conditioned, which is genuinely useful on the north–south axis though it does not serve the Zona Colonial directly. Otherwise the city moves by carro público or concho — shared cars running fixed routes, cheap and crowded — by guagua minibuses, and by app-hailed taxis, which are the simplest option for a visitor. The old quarter itself is walked. On seasons: the dry, cooler months from roughly December to April are the comfortable ones and coincide with the baseball season and carnival in February; summer is hot and humid, and the hurricane season runs from June to November, with the highest risk from August to October. Whatever the month, the city's rhythm is the same — quiet and shuttered through the worst of the afternoon heat, and fully alive from about six in the evening onwards.