Isabel de Torres National Park

Isabel de Torres National Park tickets and tours: which one to book

Pico Isabel de Torres is the flat-topped green mountain that rises directly behind the city of Puerto Plata, on the north coast of the Dominican Republic, and the visit to its summit by cable car is the city's best-known excursion, offered to every cruise passenger landing at the Amber Cove and Taino Bay terminals and to every guest of the all-inclusive hotels of Playa Dorada, a few kilometres east. The teleférico, which its operators describe as the only cable car in the Caribbean, was built by an Italian firm and opened in 1975; its lower station is at the foot of the mountain on the south-western edge of the city, ten to fifteen minutes by taxi or motoconcho from the centre, and its two cabins, each holding about seventeen people standing, climb to the summit in eight to ten minutes, passing over treetops and, often, into cloud.

Tickets are bought at the station, with a higher price for foreigners, and the queue on days when ships are in port can be an hour or more, which is the chief reason to come at opening or to take one of the city tours that hold reserved places. Those half-day tours commonly combine the cable car with the Victorian centre of Puerto Plata, the San Felipe fortress, the amber museum, a rum or cigar factory and a chocolate tasting. Self-appointed guides who attach themselves to visitors at the top expect a tip, and can be politely declined. The mountain can also be climbed on foot, by a steep, muddy trail of two and a half to four hours from the village of El Cupey on the southern side or from the city side, best done with a local guide, or reached by a rough, winding road in a 4×4.

Visiting Isabel de Torres National Park: what you will see

The mountain is an isolated outlier of the Cordillera Septentrional, the northern range of Hispaniola, rising abruptly from the coastal plain to 793 metres, and its upper slopes were declared a natural monument and later a national park, covering about fifteen to twenty-two square kilometres according to the decree consulted. It is said to have been named by Columbus for Queen Isabella, and it was Columbus who, seeing its summit permanently wreathed in silvery cloud, named the harbour below the port of silver. That cloud is the mountain's ecological fact: the trade winds blowing off the Atlantic are forced up the slope and condense, so that while the city swelters, the top is cool, damp and frequently fogbound, and carries a cloud forest quite unlike the vegetation of the plain, with tree ferns, wild begonias, bromeliads, orchids, mosses, the mountain palm, and the Hispaniolan pine in places, watered by streams that supply the city.

At the summit, the cable car delivers visitors to a seven-hectare botanical garden, laid out in the 1970s, with paths, ponds, little bridges, a collection of native and exotic tropical plants, a cave, and a few souvenir shops and a café, all of it rather genteel and slightly faded. In the middle stands a replica, some sixteen metres tall with its domed pedestal, of the Christ the Redeemer of Rio de Janeiro, arms outstretched over the city; the dome beneath it was built as a fortress in the time of the dictator Rafael Trujillo. From the terraces, when the cloud allows, the view takes in the whole of Puerto Plata, its grid of streets, the fortress on its point, the cruise ships, the curve of the coast east to Playa Dorada and Sosúa and the blue of the Atlantic. The forest shelters some thirty-two species of birds that are found only on Hispaniola, among them the Hispaniolan woodpecker, the palmchat, which is the national bird, the broad-billed tody, the Hispaniolan parrot and the Hispaniolan lizard-cuckoo, along with the endemic solenodon, a nocturnal, venomous, shrew-like relic that almost no one ever sees.

Isabel de Torres National Park: best time to go, seasons and hours

The cable car runs daily from about 8.30 am to 5 pm, with the last ascent in mid-afternoon, and closes in high wind, thunderstorms and for maintenance, sometimes for days at a time, so check that it is working before setting out. Go as early as possible: the summit is usually clearest in the first hours of the morning and clouds over by eleven or twelve, and the cruise-ship groups arrive from about ten.

December to April is the driest and least humid period; May, October and November are the wettest months on the north coast. It is noticeably cooler at the top, and the paths are slippery when wet. Allow two hours. Puerto Plata's fortress and Victorian houses are fifteen minutes away, the Damajagua waterfalls half an hour, Sosúa and the kitesurfing beach of Cabarete half an hour to an hour east.