The city thrives chiefly on tourism, with many of its inhabitants employed in the hotel complexes of Punta Cana a few kilometers away, or selling tourist products.

[citation needed] The economy of Higüey is based on tropical agriculture (reed, coffee, tobacco, cacao, rice, and maize), livestock (cattle and pigs), fishing and tourism on the coast.

The main historical attraction in Higüey is the cathedral, which displays the "Virgen de la Altagracia", a painting brought by Spanish missionaries in the 15th century.

Every year on Virgin of La Altagracia Day, which is a national holiday on January 21, tens of thousands of pilgrims visit the cathedral.

He assigned Esquivél to subjugate the area, justifying the assignment as payback for a Taino attack (led by Cotubanamá) on 8 Spanish sailors, which was in turn revenge for Spaniards who slaughtered the Cacique of nearby Saona for sport, setting a battle Mastiff to attack him as he was loading traded cassava bread on a barge.

[5] Bartolomé de las Casas participated in and later described the Higüey massacre in which the Spanish slaughtered natives who surrendered after a short but heroic resistance.

Men, women, and children were disemboweled alive; many were tortured by having hands and feet cut off as the Spaniards taunted, while others were hanged or knifed to death.

The local economy sputtered under military rule and land expropriations, although slavery did end under both Haitian control and British naval enforcement throughout the Caribbean of antislavery policies advocated by William Wilberforce.

[citation needed] When the Dominican Republic was proclaimed in 1844 through the efforts of La Trinitaria, the new Governmental Central Meeting placed Higüey under administration of the Province of El Seibo.

[8] After the War of Restoration, the second Republic, either because of or in spite of the Monroe Doctrine lasted until 1916, although the countryside remained extremely poor and actually governed by various aristocratic cliques.

[citation needed] Guerillas from El Seibo province fought the United States occupation of Santo Domingo from 1916 to 1924.

The area experienced a few years of relative prosperity before agricultural prices again crashed and further de facto dictatorships began under Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina.

[citation needed] The city is divided into more than 50 sectors, some of them are: Higüey features a trade-wind tropical rainforest climate, with consistently high temperatures and substantial rainfall throughout the year.

Every year on her feast day (January 21), thousands of Dominicans gather to venerate the miraculous image at what might be the earliest Marian shrine in the Americas.

Juan de Esquivel, conqueror of the local Taino and later Jamaica, founded the historic village of Salvaleón of Higüey in 1505, and included a parish church.