Name: Residencial Caridad
Address: Avenida República de Argentina, Santiago, Santiago, Santiago, 51000, Dominican Republic
Rating: 9

Smoke-free property

No elevators

General

Airport transportation

Transfer

Parking

Beauty and wellness

Pets Not Allowed

Pets

Personal protection equipment for staff

Extra decontamination measures

Personal protection equipment for guests

Additional measures against COVID-19

Health and Safety Measures

Location

At the apartment

Cibao International Airport

Playa Dorada

Playa Dorada Golf Club

La Union Airport

Long Beach

Amber Museum

Fort San Felipe

Los Mangos Golf Course

Playa Cofresi

Ocean World Adventure Park

Cabarete Beach

Residencial Caridad

Santiago

We rented a villa in the Casa Linda community through a 3rd party, Casa Coco Tropical Villas, as Casa Linda doesn't rent villas directly. We rented the Perla villa (#862).

The villa was very nice; clean and well-maintained. While smaller than I expected from the pictures, it was perfect for our needs - two couples for a week.

The location, near a road, sometimes caused distractions, but the road is NOT busy so those distractions were few and far between. It is within walking distance of the Casa Linda Welcome Center, which made it convenient and easy for us as we got together with several sets of people during our time there and we’d just tell them to meet outside the Welcome Center. Again, convenient and easy for all of us.

The villa itself is well laid out, with bedrooms on either side of the main living room / kitchen area. One bedroom had an ensuite, while the other used the ‘common’ bathroom with a door just outside the bedroom. Since there were two couples, we just treated the ‘common’ bathroom as if it was an ensuite for the 2nd bedroom. Both bedrooms have sliding doors out to the pool area but, honestly, we never used them. We kept the two sets of sliding doors in the main living area open almost all the time, but tried to keep the bedrooms a bit cooler by keeping them closed up. Both bedrooms also had in-room safes which we liked.

The pool was cleaned every day, in the morning. There was also a pool net which we used ourselves periodically just to get the bugs and leaves out that tended to randomly drop in during the day. At night the place was very nice, with lights above the bar, above the outdoor dining table, as well as in the pool. The pool has a shallow area, which is apparently supposed to be used for lounge chairs. We weren’t comfortable putting the wicker-like chairs in there and instead used it to walk around while enjoying a drink or a cigar (or both) in the evenings. The pool area also had a half bath to use while enjoying the pool area.

We did have one fairly significant maintenance issue during our stay. The refrigerator stopped cooling one day, resulting in the loss of quite a bit of food. Strangely, the freezer continued to work fine. We moved as much food as we could out to the outside bar refrigerator, but that unit is quite small and we weren’t able to get it all in. The Casa Coco people got there pretty quickly (within an hour or two of contacting them) but they weren’t able to repair it. It took until late in the day before they were able to get a refrigerator repair person in to affect the repair. This resulted in us tossing $50 or $60 worth of food, including some that had been prepared by Chef Rocio’s team (more on that below), which didn’t make us happy, but we survived.

Since I mentioned Chef Rocio, I’ll offer this one last suggestion: I highly recommend you connect with Chef Rocio and have her or her team make you a meal. They will make you way more food than you can possibly eat, but it is so darn good that you’ll try to eat it all anyway. But if you do this, do it very early in your stay because they will bring all sorts of extra food and supplies (you pay a set fee for the service and then they give you a receipt for all the food and supplies, for which you reimburse them) which you will find useful if you plan to make any meals yourself.

Overall, we had a great experience and would not hesitate to rent this villa, or any villa, from Casa Coco in the future.


A nice villa experience

Villa was dated with dirty furniture, windows and doors that didn’t lock, toilet in one bath didn’t work and we needed to fix, shower head in master bath was a trickle,  no hot water for three days, kept being told to run it longer but propane tank was actually empty, lights around pool step missing with wires hanging out, linens old, bedspread with holes. Housekeeping was good but kept missing one room. 
Ground and landscaping was beautiful and well maintained

Too busy building new villas not maintaining current villa

Yep, disgusting American P*ssy Parties going on & owners are making $$$_ pimping out homes! Sosua is a complete disgusting cesspool! It's shameful how young Dominican Republic women are being exploited! 
Somebody finally had to say it! 😱

Nasty

Para my casa linda is one of the best projects where you can invest to buy a house or rent it is safe and an excellent place I recommend you a nice house Jesus taxi 809316 0060 so well has sunlight pool so that you can count on excellent safety.

Jesus taxi Transfer tour of sosua

We celebrated my cousins bachelorette party here, we had the most amazing time. The staff was so accommodating, the property was beautiful. Overall we had the best experience here, and it was because of the most amazing staff so kind and generous.

Amazing!

Casa Linda offers a great alternative to the standard all-inclusive resorts in Dominican Republic.  The individual casitas with private pool are welcoming, clean and comfortable.  Resort staff are all really nice and accommodating.  Casa Linda offers revolving daily bus service to the best, least crowded beaches in the area.  We'd definitely stay here again!

Great location and great facilities

I was looking for a 2 bedroom unit in the Caribbean to trade into through Interval International, and this villa at Casa Linda caught my eye since it was a stand-alone villa with its own private pool for my family to enjoy. We had never been to the Dominican Republic before, but decided to give it a try. Our Interval booking said it was a Unit UUU2, which must be some internal code since I could not relate it to anything on the resort map. I saw some reviews that said some villas are very dates, so I had to hope for the best.

When we arrived at the Visitor Center, we were presented with a little briefcase containing all of the remotes to the tvs and air conditioners. Then we had to hop back into our taxi to be driven to our unit. They said they're getting golf carts for guests to use later this year. 

We were assigned villa 869a. It was beautiful, modern, and very clean. The kitchen was fully stocked with cooking supplies and dishes, and a full fridge, gas oven/range, microwave, and dishwasher. It also had a water cooler that came with two 5-gallon bottles of water, and we were able to get a couple more delivered for a small fee. The 2 bathrooms had modern vanities and glass shower enclosures. This villa has king beds in both bedrooms (although my kids would have preferred separate beds), both with plenty of closet space and a safe in each closet. The bedrooms had air conditioning and ceiling fans, but the living room only had a fan. The bedrooms and living room had huge sliding glass/screen doors leading out to the pool area. The pool was perfect for our family of 4 with 2 kids who LOVE to swim, surrounded by a nice covered patio with a couple love set couches and bar stools around an outdoor minibar area with a small fridge and propane grill. There were also some lounge chairs for sun worshippers. We spent a lot of time outdoors. Housekeeping came by every other day, and a pool maintenance crew came by twice as well.

This villa was a very short walk to the water park, which we visited 3 times. Our kids got in free, and it was like $3/apiece for me and my husband. The swim up bar was great - delicious mojitos! Our kids loved the pizza, and the other food was ok too. The park was virtually empty most of the time in early April, however, it got a little busier in the couple days leading up to Easter, which is a huge travel holiday for DR locals.

The only downfall to our villa was that is was surrounded by construction of other nearby villas. While this is only temporary until construction is complete in this area, it was quite a distraction Monday-Friday from 9am-5pm - definitely detracted from the serenity of the villa's outdoor area and pool. The road to our villa wasn't paved yet, making for a very bumpy car ride, and tracking lots of orange dirt inside from our walks. I would love to return in another year when construction of this phase is complete. Although the villas are pretty close to each other, they do nice job with privacy landscaping between them. 

Our concierge Gabriel guilted us into a "breakfast presentation" of the resort, so we learned all about their vacation club. Casa Linda just recently partnered with Interval, which I think they are using as a way to get people on site to then market their vacation club. However, being Interval members already, we did not see much point in joining. They tried to push the "money maker" angle (that we could rent our weeks for $300/day), but I don't see units going for nearly that much on Airbnb. 

The resort offered shuttles that ran several times/day into downtown Sosua, Sosua Beach, and Cabarete. However, we seemed to keep missing the timing, so we often had the desk call us taxis. We used it to go to local grocery stores and home from Cabarete. 

We did not use the excursion desk in the Visitor Center. Instead, we used the EduarTaxi Caberete service for both our our airport transfers, a trip to the 27 Waterfalls, and a trip to Monkey Jungle. It was much cheaper to do the 2 day trips via taxi and pay the park admissions there (our driver even negotiated discounts once we got there), rather than book through Viator or other excursion companies. And we enjoyed having private vans!

We did some SCUBA diving with Aqua Adventures by Scuba Dive Sosua with the dive shop owner Pablo, who was wonderful with our kids who are newly certified. We had great dives at 3 Rocks and the Canyon. After diving in the afternoon, we went to a local restaurant for dinner (caught beautiful sunsets at Waterfront on Playa Alicia and Ristorante Pirates Bay on Sosua Beach.

We would definitely return to Casa Linda in the future.

Beautiful, private 2 bedroom villa with our own pool - trade through Interval International

Avoid at all costs...stayed here for 4 weeks and hated every minute of it. Casa Linda do not enforce their own policies. Prostitutes come and go at will even though "guests" must be accompanied. Weekends are party central as gangs arrive shouting fighting and swearing playing boomboxes as loud as they can go and even after ringing security they continue after they have left so you'll get zero sleep. Owners are selling up by the dozen only leaving the rentals to literally fight amongst themselves. Do yourself a favor and leave this property off your list! Casa Linda is going to be taken over by Airbnb very soon as there are only about 80 owners left out of 300 + villas and even they are selling up. The property is falsely advertised as it states in the listing: "Surrounded by mature lush tropical landscape" when in fact it is surrounded by 7 short-term rental villas crammed within yards of it. The images you see were taken years ago before they developed the surrounding area. The whole development is like a concrete jungle as they seem to be determined to cram as many villas onto such a small area. By the way, the mini supermarket they say is open has been closed for MONTHS, with no sign of it being opened again. You have to travel almost 3km to the supermarket to get any provisions. DO NOT GO HERE!

DON'T GO HERE!

I rented an AirBnB in Phase 7 of the complex. It was fairly newly constructed and there was construction taking place next door and down the road. The complex is pretty big (9 phases in all) but at no time did I see a great amount of people or feel crowded in any sense. It is my understand that out of approximately 300 villas, about 100 are owned and lived in and the remainder are available for short stays by visitors.

While driving up to the property, it appeared to be isolated down a quiet road. In reality, there are many places within a 3-5 minute car or shuttle (complimentary by Casa Linda) ride. There is security both at the entrance and visible walking around the property during the evenings.

Our villa (2 bedrooms, private pool and furnished patio) was very clean, spacious and very comfortable. All of the necessary amenities were included and there were safety boxes in each bedroom. There were small ants outside of the villa but not much of a nuisance inside and not uncommon in places located near the woods or beach. I will note that the bedrooms had both A/C and fans, while the living room only had fans. Wasn't much of an issue during our January stay but during the warmer months, could be a bit toasty even with the doors open.

On-site was a wonderful restaurant (that served actual Dominican food in addition to other country dishes), a small grocery store and a water park.

The staff all around was super helpful and there were local tours available for purchase. 

Casa Linda will be my go-to place when visiting the Puerta Plata area.

Enjoy!

A wonderful stay

Do not fall for the pretty pictures.  Our experience was the worst in 30 years of travelling to the Caribbean.  The DR has too many great places to stay to waste your time on this one.  We checked in January 2021 for a three months stay.  We only lasted 8 days.  First, no water at all, then no hot water for all 8 days, dirty, very poorly stocked (not even a tea towel), no laundry as promised, no propane and loud music from surrounding villas.  When we arrived, we cleaned the villa and there were cockroaches, they said they would take care of them, no one showed up.  It was obvious it was an infestation.  The villa needed to be tented and fumigated.  We negotiated a price but when they take your credit card they take a daily rate and convert so we ended up paying $150 more.  When they refunded some of our money they do the same thing and you lose another $150.  No one in the office has found the time to contact us in 10 months time.  DO NOT MAKE THE MISTAKE WE DID.  Stay somewhere more reputable and that actually has someone to speak to regarding customer service.

Residencial Caridad

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