Casa de Campo Resort & Villas

The Hotel

Casa de Campo opened in 1974 as a private resort and residential estate developed by Gulf+Western (then the owner of the surrounding La Romana Sugar Estate, which still operates and which gives the resort its name — "casa de campo" being colloquial Spanish for "country house"). The original concept was developed by Dominican industrialist Alvaro Carta and the American architect William Cox, with the explicit ambition of building the first integrated luxury estate-resort in the Caribbean: a hotel, residential villas, three golf courses, a marina, equestrian facilities, polo grounds, and a private airport, all on a contiguous 7,000-acre property at the south-eastern tip of the Dominican Republic. The vision predated the better-known Caribbean luxury developments at Mustique, Lyford Cay, and the original Sandy Lane by some years and was, at its opening, the most ambitious resort-real-estate project in the region.

The hotel runs to approximately 185 guestrooms and suites in the main Casa de Campo lodge, supplemented by hundreds of privately-owned villas on the estate that can be rented through the resort. The Elite Rooms and Garden Jacuzzi Suites in the main lodge — refurbished in the 2017–2019 programme — run 50 to 75 square metres with king beds, walk-in dressing rooms, marble bathrooms, and private balconies or terraces overlooking either the gardens, the pool complex, or out to the Caribbean Sea. The villa categories — three- to seven-bedroom private homes with their own pools, dedicated housekeeping and butler service, and golf-cart access across the estate — are the property's distinctive accommodation type and the format the repeat clientele books. The estate operates more than 100 villas in active rental rotation; the upper category, the Sugar Sun and Hacienda villas, run upwards of USD 5,000 per night.

The defining feature of the resort is the golf. Teeth of the Dog, Pete Dye's 1971 design — opened three years before the hotel itself, and the course around which the rest of the estate was subsequently laid out — remains the #1 ranked golf course in the Caribbean and is consistently ranked among the top 50 worldwide. Seven of the 18 holes play directly along the Caribbean Sea; the par-3 fifth and the par-4 seventh are the postcard set pieces. Dye Fore (also Pete Dye, 2003) plays along the limestone cliffs above the Chavón River and is the longer, harder, more visually dramatic of the three; the Links runs inland and is the most playable. Beyond the golf, the resort runs eight outdoor pools, eight restaurants (the best of which, La Caña by Il Circo, is the Italian-Dominican fine-dining venue on the lower terrace), the Marina with 350 berths, an equestrian centre with 250 horses, a five-field polo club, a shooting club, and direct access to the recreated 16th-century Italian village of Altos de Chavón — built in 1976 by Italian designer Roberto Copa, with a 5,000-seat amphitheatre that has hosted Frank Sinatra and Julio Iglesias openings.

For multi-generational family stays, for golf-anchored weeks among friends, for proper Caribbean privacy through a private villa, Casa de Campo remains the standing benchmark. The criticism — that the resort is too sprawling, that getting around requires a golf cart, that the residential character means it never feels like a focused hotel — is also the point: this is an estate, not a beach property, and visitors who want only a beach and a pool would do better elsewhere on the Dominican coast. For visitors who want to be inside a private country for a week, it remains uncontested.

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