5 good reasons to NOT live in the Colonial Zone of Santo Domingo (April 2021 Update)

Reason 3 to NOT live in the Colonial Zone: No real shopping culture or facilities

As stated before, the Colonial Zone is a beautiful area to live in and attracts a lot of tourists as well. For residents of the Colonial Zone, that means a deep change in how they supply themselves with what they need for their own daily lives. The reason for that is how the merchants in the Colonial Zone structured their stalls to adapt to the tourists.

That’s how it usually looks on Calle El Conde

You’ll find of course many high-priced restaurants, plenty of accommodation facilities, souvenirs- and tourist-shops in the Colonial Zone. Not a surprise here, but a logical cause from the demand of the external visitors who come by plane, bus or cruise ship to Santo Domingo and the Colonial Zone.

Therefore, shopping request for residents which extend the regular daily needs are difficult to be satisfied. You might need to look for all supplies that exceed your regular needs in other neighborhoods. That can be quite complicated if you don’t have an own car and are not mobile to reach and transport things.

Whenever you need stuff like decoration, flowers, tools, good fashion, furniture, or delicacies, the Colonial Zone is the wrong place to be and to look for. Although it consists of the famous street ‘El Conde’ (which is technically the best shopping mile of the whole city) it’s not used in an appropriate way for residents.

El Conde is usually the most active street in the Colonial Zone.

A shopping mall or better shops with better supplies is what a resident of the Colonial Zone would need. And Santo Domingo equipped itself with plenty of Shopping Malls that appear like concrete monsters in the center of the city. I would say, that there are even too many of it. Far too many.

There are so many, that they even cannibalize each other. Unfortunately, and because of all these reasons, a thoroughly planned shopping culture doesn’t exist in the whole city of Santo Domingo, neither in its Colonial Zone.

But the Colonial Zone is maybe even worse in terms of shopping. Having a lot of appreciating and solvent tourists is great for a city and enables jobs and money for a lot of people inside and outside of the historic center of Santo Domingo. But the Colonial Zone, respectively all its inhabitants, suffer from the strong effects of touristization. You should definitely consider that before you want to move there.

But next to missing shopping facilities, there was something else I missed in the Colonial Zone.

Next page: Lack of sport activities