Cabarete
By noon most days, the sky above Cabarete Beach is threaded with kites — reds, yellows, the occasional neon green — as riders cut back and forth across the bay. The wind here blows roughly 300 days a year, and the town has organized itself entirely around that fact. Surf shops occupy what might elsewhere be pharmacies. Instructors compare notes over cortados at open-air cafés. The beach itself runs wide and golden, busy but not crowded, with enough room for kiteboarders at one end and families at the other.
Cabarete sits on the Dominican Republic's north coast, about 20 minutes east of Puerto Plata. It's a small town that draws an international crowd — wave riders, instructors, long-term expats — and has the easy, slightly makeshift energy that tends to follow serious watersports culture.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who come back tend to fall into a rhythm: surf session in the morning at Playa Encuentro, three miles west, then return to the main beach around noon when the trade winds pick up for kiting. Evenings drift from beach bar to beach bar, barefoot, unhurried. The guagua from Puerto Plata airport runs for around $2 and drops you right on the main strip.
How Cabarete came to be
Before tourism arrived, this stretch of coast was Taíno land, settled by Arawak-speaking people across northern Hispaniola. The town itself was founded in 1835 by the American merchant Zephaniah Kingsley, who established it as part of his Mayorasgo de Koka estate, relocating his mixed-race family and 53 freed people from his Florida plantations — then later bringing another 100 enslaved people. His partner Anna Kingsley owned a house that ran from the harbor to the sea.
For most of the following century Cabarete remained a quiet coastal settlement. The pivot came in 1984, when Canadian windsurfer Jean Laporte recognized what the bay's steady trade winds could do and opened the first windsurfing school. The Professional Windsurfing Association held World Cup events here in 1988, 1991, and 1997, and the town's identity shifted permanently toward the water.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
See Cabarete in motion
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Temperatures stay between the low 70s and high 80s Fahrenheit year-round, so the season is less about heat than wind and rain. January through April is the sweet spot — strong, consistent trade winds of 14–24 knots and relatively dry weather; May brings the heaviest rainfall, and October and November are the wettest months overall.
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.