Jánico () is a

municipality A municipality is usually a single administrative division having municipal corporation, corporate status and powers of self-government or jurisdiction as granted by national and regional laws to which it is subordinate. The term ''municipality ...

(''

municipio ' (, ) and ' () are country subdivisions in Italy and several Hispanophone and Lusophone nations, respectively. They are often translated as "municipality". In the English language, a municipality often is defined as relating to a single city or ...

'') of the Santiago province in the

Dominican Republic The Dominican Republic ( ; es, República Dominicana, ) is a country located on the island of Hispaniola in the Greater Antilles archipelago of the Caribbean region. It occupies the eastern five-eighths of the island, which it shares with ...

. Within the municipality there are two

municipal district A municipal district is an administrative entity comprising a clearly-defined territory and its population. It can refer to a city, a town, a village, a small grouping of them, or a rural area. Brazil In Brazil, municipal districts are, in genera ...

s (''distritos municipal''):

El Caimito EL, El or el may refer to: Religion * El (deity), a Semitic word for "God" People * EL (rapper) (born 1983), stage name of Elorm Adablah, a Ghanaian rapper and sound engineer * El DeBarge, music artist * El Franco Lee (1949–2016), America ...

and

Juncalito The town of Juncalito is a municipal district within the municipality of Jánico, in the Santiago province of the Dominican Republic. Juncalito is a municipal district of Jánico, is located in the Cordillera Central at an altitude of more t ...

Christopher Columbus Christopher Columbus * lij, Cristoffa C(or)ombo * es, link=no, Cristóbal Colón * pt, Cristóvão Colombo * ca, Cristòfor (or ) * la, Christophorus Columbus. (; born between 25 August and 31 October 1451, died 20 May 1506) was a ...

established a stockade here in March 1494, to protect his gold mining ambitions. The prospectivity of gold was established earlier in the year by

Alonso de Ojeda Alonso de Ojeda (; c. 1466 – c. 1515) was a Spanish explorer, governor and conquistador. He travelled through modern-day Guyana, Venezuela, Trinidad, Tobago, Curaçao, Aruba and Colombia. He navigated with Amerigo Vespucci who is famous f ...

's expedition. Jánico is part of a region known as the Sierra ( es, La Sierra; ). This region was peopled in the 18th century mostly by ethnic Canarians and

French French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to France ** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents ** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...

who established a markedly endogamous society in which

cousin marriage A cousin marriage is a marriage where the spouses are cousins (i.e. people with common grandparents or people who share other fairly recent ancestors). The practice was common in earlier times, and continues to be common in some societies to ...

s were fairly common, in order to preserve their whiteness; only a very few were slaveholders. The Sierra received a sizeable amount of

white White is the lightness, lightest color and is achromatic (having no hue). It is the color of objects such as snow, chalk, and milk, and is the opposite of black. White objects fully diffuse reflection, reflect and scattering, scatter all the ...

and mulatto refugees from both

Saint-Domingue Saint-Domingue () was a French colony in the western portion of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, in the area of modern-day Haiti, from 1659 to 1804. The name derives from the Spanish main city in the island, Santo Domingo, which came to ref ...

and the Cibao Valley, the former during the Haitian Revolution and the latter amid the Dominican genocide by the Haitian army in 1805. According to a 2016

genealogical DNA test A genealogical DNA test is a DNA-based test used in genetic genealogy that looks at specific locations of a person's genome in order to find or verify ancestral genealogical relationships, or (with lower reliability) to estimate the ethnic m ...

ing by the Genographic Project, the town has the highest percentage of both European and

pre-Columbian In the history of the Americas, the pre-Columbian era spans from the original settlement of North and South America in the Upper Paleolithic period through European colonization, which began with Christopher Columbus's voyage of 1492. Usually, ...

heritages in the island, at 61.5% and 7.8%, respectively, while the African input (including non-black

North Africans North Africa, or Northern Africa is a region encompassing the northern portion of the African continent. There is no singularly accepted scope for the region, and it is sometimes defined as stretching from the Atlantic shores of Mauritania in ...

) was numbered at 29.6%, the second lowest. ''For comparison with other municipalities and municipal districts see the

list of municipalities and municipal districts of the Dominican Republic The municipalities of the Dominican Republic are, after the regions and the provinces, the third level of the political and administrative division of the Dominican Republic. The division of provinces into municipalities ('' municipios'') is est ...

.''

References

Municipalities of the Dominican Republic Populated places in Santiago Province (Dominican Republic) {{DominicanRepublic-geo-stub