Haiti Geography

Haiti takes up the western third of Hispaniola, the second-largest island in the Caribbean, sharing it with the Dominican Republic along a 376-kilometre border. The Taíno called it Ayiti, mountainous land, and that is still the most accurate one-word description of it.

Four ranges and no plain worth the name

The Massif du Nord runs along the northern peninsula; the Montagnes Noires and the Chaîne des Matheux cross the middle; and in the south the Massif de la Hotte and the Massif de la Selle carry the country’s high ground, rising to 2,680 metres at Pic la Selle. Between them the Artibonite valley and the Plaine du Cul-de-Sac are the only substantial flat areas, and both are intensively farmed.

A coastline of bays

The two peninsulas enclose the Gulf of Gonâve, with the island of Gonâve in the middle of it. The result is a very long coastline for a small country, with sheltered water, coral, and beaches on the Côte des Arcadins, at Port-Salut in the south and along the northern shore east of Cap-Haïtien.

Deforestation, and what follows from it

Haiti has lost the great majority of its original tree cover, largely to charcoal production, and on slopes this steep the consequences are immediate: topsoil goes into the sea, rivers flood catastrophically, and a storm that would be survivable elsewhere causes landslides here. Reforestation programmes exist and are small relative to the problem.

On a fault line

The Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault runs along the southern peninsula. It produced the earthquake of January 2010, which killed well over a hundred thousand people, and another in August 2021 that killed more than two thousand.