In a stark address delivered before the Dominican Republic’s Senate, senior lawmaker Rafael Barón Duluc — widely known by his nickname Cholitín — has sounded the alarm over unregulated, uneven expansion in the province of La Altagracia, home to the Caribbean’s iconic tourist hubs Punta Cana and Bávaro. While the region has cemented its reputation as one of the top travel destinations in the Americas, drawing millions of visitors and generating billions in annual revenue, its rapid growth has come at a steep cost, Duluc argued.
Duluc framed La Altagracia’s current crisis as a case of “being punished by success”: the province’s booming tourism economy has failed to deliver broad-based improvements to quality of life for local residents, leaving critical public sectors starved for targeted investment and basic infrastructure outdated and overstretched. One of the most glaring gaps in data is also the root of many of the region’s challenges, he claimed: official population counts drastically undercount the actual number of people who call La Altagracia home, with Duluc putting the current population at over 1 million, far higher than government estimates.
To address this data deficit, Duluc is backing a Senate resolution that calls on President Luis Abinader to direct the National Statistics Office (ONE) to carry out a one-time, specialized census focused exclusively on La Altagracia. Without an accurate count of residents, the senator explained, local and national leaders cannot allocate sufficient funding or resources to fix widespread shortages that have plagued daily life in the province. These shortages range from K-12 classroom space and accessible public transportation to core utility services, while unmanaged population growth has also turned chronic traffic congestion into a daily crisis in both Punta Cana and the nearby town of Verón.
Duluc’s warning carries added weight, as it aligns with recent comments from Frank Rainieri, the pioneering tourism developer who helped transform Punta Cana from a remote coastal stretch into a global travel destination. Rainieri recently echoed the same concern, describing the region’s current pattern of unregulated growth as fundamentally unsustainable long-term. For Duluc, the specialized census is not just a bureaucratic exercise — it is the most critical first step to lay the groundwork for informed strategic planning, targeted public investment, and inclusive growth that can benefit both the tourism industry and the local community that calls La Altagracia home.