Playa Dorada

Playa Dorada is a resort complex about 7 km east of central Puerto Plata and about 19 km west of Sosúa. It grew out of a state tourism project in the 1970s, for which INFRATUR, an institute under the Central Bank, prepared the land and shared services to attract private hotel investment.

The complex is regarded as the country's first large beach resort development. Its 18-hole golf course, designed by Robert Trent Jones Sr., opened in the second half of the 1970s, and the first hotel, Jack Tar Village, opened around 1980.

Today the complex combines all-inclusive hotels, residential condominiums, a shopping plaza, tennis courts and the golf course along a beach of roughly 1.9 km. Golf Digest ranked the course among the 100 best outside the United States in 2006.