Inside Cueva de Cotubanama, pre-Columbian pictographs and petroglyphs mark the walls -- evidence that this 110-square-kilometer island off the Dominican Republic's southeast coast was not wilderness to the Taino but home. Columbus landed here during his second voyage to the Americas and appointed da Cuneo its first governor, a title that meant little to the people already living on it. What happened next was grimmer. In 1502, a Spanish crew member unleashed a mastiff on a cacique during a routine stop to load cassava, mauling the leader to death. The resulting uprising gave Governor Nicolas de Ovando the pretext he wanted. Bartolome de las Casas, who accompanied the punitive expedition, later documented what followed: many Taino were killed, many more were enslaved and shipped away. Saona fell silent. For more than four centuries, no one lived here permanently.

The waters around Saona collected ships the way the caves collected bats. At least three vessels wrecked on the island's reefs during the early Spanish colonial period, driven ashore by storms or stripped by pirates who knew these passages well. But no settlement took root. The island sat empty through the age of sugar plantations, through Dominican independence, through two world wars. It was not until 1944 that the first permanent buildings rose on Saona, and a fishing village slowly took shape at Mano Juan. Today roughly 600 people live there, their homes mingled with boutique hotels that cater to the island's other economy: more than one million tourists visit Saona each year, making it the most visited protected area in the Dominican Republic.

Saona sits within Cotubanama National Park, and its ecosystems are dense with life. Four species of neotropical mangrove -- red, white, black, and button -- line the Catuano Channel that separates the island from the mainland. Inland, palm forests give way to lowland rainforest and semi-humid scrub. The surrounding Caribbean waters host 40 species of fish, 10 species of coral, and 124 species of mollusks. Of the 539 registered species of endemic flora within the national park, most are found on Saona. The island runs entirely on solar power, a renewable energy plant providing electricity to every resident -- a detail that feels appropriate for a place where the dominant sound remains wind through palm fronds.

Hollywood discovered what the Taino always knew: Saona photographs beautifully. Parts of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl were filmed here in 2003, and scenes from The Blue Lagoon used the island's beaches as backdrop. The film crews are long gone, but the tourism they helped fuel captured 45 percent of all visits to Dominican protected areas in 2019. Mano Juan remains small, though -- a place where fishermen still mend nets alongside guests sipping rum from coconut shells. The island manages to be both the country's busiest nature reserve and, once the catamaran tours leave for the day, one of its quietest.