Salto El Limón drops forty metres down an algae-green wall in the hills of the Samaná peninsula, in the northeast of the Dominican Republic, into a cold pool between boulders. The people who take you there are not a tour company. They are farming families from the village of El Limón, organised into thirteen paradas that take the work in turns, and the horse you are given is somebody's working animal. A rider walks you up a red-dirt track through cacao and coffee plots, forty minutes of climbing that turns to slick clay after rain, and the final descent to the water is yours to walk whichever way you came. More than 500 families live off this one trail. The sound arrives before the sight, and the spray before the pool.
The water lands cold and green, deep enough to swim out and take the fall on your shoulders at its base, with the cliff behind it running gold and green where algae hold on in the permanent wet. A viewpoint above shows the whole scene: a slim white ribbon dropping into a hidden pool, entirely swallowed by canopy. The fall changes with the season. In the dry months the plume breaks apart into dozens of thin threads combing down the wall, and the pool below turns clear green. At the peak of the wet season it is at its widest and loudest; the Samaná station averages 261 millimetres of rain in November alone. None of this is the limestone of the coast: the ridges here are marble and schist, seafloor rock dragged deep down a subduction zone and pushed back up. In the summer of 2019 the fall stopped altogether. The Arroyo Chico that makes it rises outside the protected line drawn in 1996, on private ground where forest had been cut for pasture and water tapped away, and when the drought came some paradas went from thirty or forty riders a day to under ten. The monument was declared without the stream that feeds it.