Upon returning in late 1493, Columbus found his fort burned and the settlers killed. He established his first small colony further east - La Isabela , today the village of El Castillo - where he set up a trading settlement to trade cheap European goods in return for large quantities of gold. La Isabela soon fell apart. Settlers died in the hundreds from malaria and yellow fever, and one disgruntled colonist hijacked a ship and headed back to Spain to complain. Columbus followed him back in 1496, and during his absence the colony was abandoned, with most Spaniards re-settling at Santo Domingo along the mouth of the Ozama River. When Columbus returned in 1498, the colonists refused to obey his orders, and in 1500 he was sent back to Spain in chains.

Spain's King Ferdinand replaced Columbus with NicolA?s de Ovando , with instructions to impose order on the unruly outpost. Ovando instigated the monumental construction in today's Zona Colonial and engaged in the systematic destruction of TaA­no society, apportioning all TaA­nos to Spanish settlers as slaves and forcing their conversion to Christianity. Lacking resistance to Old World diseases and subjected to countless acts of random violence, the TaA­nos were quickly exterminated through overwork, suicide and disease.

To make up for the steep decline of forced labour, the Spaniards began embarking on slaving expeditions throughout the Caribbean and Central America in 1505, laying the foundation for future Spanish colonies. By 1515 the Spaniards had wiped out enough Native Americans that they began looking to slave labour from Africa, setting in motion the African slave trade. Santo Domingo's power slowly eroded as Spain branched out across the Americas, and by the end of the sixteenth century was little more than a colonial backwater. The French began encroaching in 1629, settling the island of Tortuga and branching out from there onto the western side of Hispaniola. When the French colony's slaves revolted in the early nineteenth century, they had little trouble invading and occupying Spanish Hispaniola, ruling it for 21 years. Only in 1843 were the Spanish colonists able to boot the invaders out, and for the first time establish the Dominican Republic as an independent country.

But this independence did not last long. A series of warlords known as caudillos tore the country apart in their quest for money and power, and in 1861 strongman Pedro Santana sold the island back to Spain. The Spaniards didn't last long, though; almost immediately a new revolutionary movement was formed, and the occupiers were forced to withdraw in 1865. A renewed period of extended civil warfare between caudillos ensued until the United States intervened in 1914. The Americans stayed for over eight years, successfully reorganizing the nation's financing but instituting a repressive national police. When the US left, this new police force took control, and its leader Rafael Leonidas Trujillo maintained absolute totalitarian control over the Dominican Republic for three decades. In the late 1950s, though, Cuba's Fidel Castro took an interest in overthrowing the dictator, and concerns about a possible Communist takeover prompted the CIA to train a group of Dominican dissidents, who assassinated Trujillo in a dramatic car chase on May 30, 1961.

Upon Trujillo's death, Vice President JoaquA­n Balaguer rose to power, and continued his totalitarian practices. Balaguer was deposed in a popular 1965 uprising, but the US military again intervened and soon placed him back in control. Only in 1978 was he forced to hold free and fair elections - and was promptly thrown out of office, only to win it back in 1986 after an extended economic crisis. Balaguer managed to edge out his rivals again in 1990, but left the presidential race in 1994 when it was obvious that he would not beat Leonel FernA?ndez , who ran a slick, centrist American-style campaign and edged the competition out by a few thousand votes. 1998 saw the first back-to-back free and fair elections in the Dominican Republic's history, as FernA?ndez gave way to political opponent and current Dominican President Hipolito Mejia . The Dominican Republic has also enjoyed the highest economic growth rate in the entire hemisphere (though this has slackened of late), and the outlook today for the nation is better than it has been in centuries.