Aman put its Dominican resort on a cliff on the north coast, above a surf beach and a golf course that runs the edge of the Atlantic. It opened in 2015. It still feels like something the island is keeping to itself.
The approach gives nothing away. You leave Puerto Plata and drive east for an hour and a quarter, past Río San Juan, until the road bends toward the sea and the jungle closes over it. Amanera waits at the end, on a bluff above Playa Grande, its casitas stepping down the slope toward the water. The Atlantic is loud here. The beach below runs long and gold and mostly empty.
John Heah drew the resort, and the architecture holds to dark wood, stone, and glass that slides away completely. The casitas are modernist boxes set into the hillside, each one turned to the ocean. Many carry a plunge pool on the terrace. From the bed there is water, sky, and not much else.
Amanera, above Playa Grande, Dominican Republic — Courtesy of Aman
The course
Playa Grande came before the hotel. Robert Trent Jones Sr. laid the golf course out in the 1990s, with a run of holes strung along the clifftops and the sea on one side. It is one of the great oceanfront rounds in the Caribbean, and Amanera folded it into the property. Guests take it in the early morning, before the trade wind stiffens and the fairways start to bite.
Below the cliffs, Playa Grande is a working surf beach. The resort keeps boards and runs guests out when the swell arrives. There is horseback riding along the sand at first light, kitesurfing when the wind turns, and slower afternoons spent foraging through the forest with a cook who turns what you gather into lunch.
Aman built for the view, then got out of the way. The cliff does the rest.
The Splendid EditThe table
Dining sits at Casa Grande, the main pavilion raised on stilts above the trees, where the kitchen leans on Dominican produce, the day's catch, and fruit grown along the north coast. A beach club holds the long lunches down on Playa Grande. The lounge bar takes rum seriously, and the country gives it plenty to work with; a rum and chocolate tasting can fill an afternoon on its own.
The spa runs to massages, scrubs, and longer journeys, and the resort still lights its bonfires on the sand when the moon is full. Cigars come from the island's own fields, rolled in front of you. Evenings turn dark and quiet early.
Aman keeps adding to its map. Amanvari, the group's first resort in Mexico, opens on Baja's East Cape on 1 August. On the Dominican north coast, Amanera stays as it began: a cliff, a beach, a course along the sea, and almost no one to share them with.
The verdict
Aman has grand hotels and desert lodges and city towers now. Amanera is neither grand nor loud. It is a cliff on a coast that most travellers still skip, with a beach nobody crowds and a golf course that would draw crowds anywhere else. That is the whole pitch.
Take a casita with the plunge pool. Play the course at dawn. Spend the rest of it watching the Atlantic do its work.
The Splendid Edit on Amanera, Playa Grande, Dominican Republic. Rates vary by season; casitas and pool casitas book through aman.com.
Photography courtesy of Aman — © Aman, Amanera, Dominican Republic