Amanera
Two thousand acres of coast and jungle, a mountain across the road, and twenty-five houses on all of it.
Amanera holds a stretch of the Dominican north coast between Rio San Juan and Cabrera, on cliffs of about sixty feet above Playa Grande. The holding is reported at two thousand acres of largely undeveloped coast, rainforest and hill, and the resort's own mountain lies across the public road with cut hiking trails on it. Inside that ground stand twenty-five houses. No other entry in this register carries a ratio like it. The golf course alone, some three hundred and seventy acres along the cliffs, is larger than most of the estates on this shelf, and it is the smaller half of the property.
The resort opened in November 2015 to a design by John Heah, its first with golf built into it, and the casitas are single-storey, green-roofed and made from local quarry stone and handmade tiles, thirteen of them with pools of about ten metres. A beach club sits in a cove on Playa Grande below, and the beach itself is a mile of public sand that villages have used for generations. The Playa Grande course was laid out by Robert Trent Jones in the nineties and rebuilt by his son in 2015, with ten holes along the cliff edge.
Emptiness bought at scale. Two thousand acres serving twenty-five houses is not a resort with grounds; it is land held so that nothing happens on it. That is the purest form of this collection's answer.
A boundary crossed by a road. The mountain belongs to the estate but sits on the far side of a public highway, so the holding is large and not continuous. The beach below is public. Both facts are recorded.
Who it is not for
Amanera is wrong for travellers who want a private beach: Playa Grande is public, a mile long and used by the villages either side. It is wrong for anyone who does not like a long transfer, since the nearest airports are ninety minutes by road. It is wrong for guests who want a resort with a full programme, because the point here is the quantity of land and the small number of people on it. For a Caribbean estate with its own sand, the shelf has closer options.
Sources
- Aman development announcement, 2015 - the resort set on about two thousand acres of largely undeveloped land, designed by John Heah, twenty-five casitas on cliffs of about sixty feet, thirteen with private pools
- Trade and golf coverage - Playa Grande course of about three hundred and seventy acres, originally by Robert Trent Jones and rebuilt by Rees Jones for the 2015 opening, with ten holes on the cliffs
Verification
- Official source
- Not yet checked
- Sources disagree
- the holding is given as two thousand acres, as more than four hundred acres of protected rainforest, and as three hundred and seventy-three acres. The larger figure appears to cover the whole estate and the smaller ones the course and the forest parcel; the scopes are not stated.
- Property confirmation
- Pending
- Last verified
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Booking
Private Resorts arranges each stay on request, quoting the rates available for the resort and dates. No benefit should be assumed unless it is confirmed in writing for the individual reservation.
Request a proposalClassified by The Resort Collection House · The Register · Edition 2026 · LHL-E-056
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