Samaná Province

Samaná Province covers the Samaná Peninsula, the long finger of land that reaches northeast from the Dominican Republic's main body into the Atlantic, and the great sheltered bay — Bahía de Samaná — that lies between the peninsula's southern shore and the mainland coast of the Hato Mayor and El Seibo provinces. The bay is 55 km long and one of the largest enclosed bodies of water in the Caribbean, sheltered enough from open Atlantic swells that it serves as winter breeding and calving habitat for North Atlantic humpback whales, which arrive from their northern feeding grounds each January and remain through March. The tidal regime is mixed semidiurnal with a mean range of roughly 0.4 to 0.7 m — small by Atlantic standards, noticeably larger than the true microtidal south Caribbean. Two unequal highs and two unequal lows each day; the difference between high and low is sufficient to change beach character and small-craft access to shallow areas. The north coast of the peninsula faces the open Atlantic with trade-wind exposure year-round; beaches like Playa El Portillo near Las Terrenas and the remote eastern beaches past Las Galeras carry consistent NE trade-wind swell. The south bay coast faces calm, turquoise water and is the launch point for whale-watching boats, island excursions, and fishing trips into the bay. ONAMET (Oficina Nacional de Meteorología) is the Dominican tidal and weather reference. Predictions on TideTurtle for Samaná Province come from Open-Meteo Marine, a gridded global ocean model; accuracy is typically within plus or minus 45 minutes on timing and 0.2 to 0.3 metres on height.