Taino heritage: the island before Columbus

Long before 1492, the island of Hispaniola was home to the Taino, an Arawak people organised into chiefdoms called cacicazgos. The north coast belonged largely to Marién and Maguá. The Taino grew cassava, sweet potato and maize, slept in hammocks, played a ball game on stone courts and carved petroglyphs in caves that survive across the island. Their population collapsed within decades of European contact through disease and forced labour. What survives is more present than most visitors realise. Hurricane, canoe, barbecue, hammock, tobacco and maize are all Taino words. Casabe, the flat cassava bread still eaten on the north coast, is made exactly as it was five hundred years ago. Rural place names across the country are Taino, not Spanish. Museums in Puerto Plata and Santiago hold good collections, and caves near the eastern end of the island preserve some of the finest rock art in the Caribbean.