Casa de Campo's Marina Just Started Keeping Its Own Calendar

On the first Saturday of June, the open-air tent at Marina Riverside Center held a runway instead of a wedding reception. The venue was built in 2019 for exactly the kind of thing it usually hosts: conferences, product launches, the occasional gala under its 1,360-person canopy on the Chavón River. This year it hosted a fashion show instead, and three weeks later it hosted a cigar and rum festival, and by October it will host a food festival expecting more than 3,000 people through its Grand Tasting Pavilion. None of those three things existed at Casa de Campo a year ago. All three now do, and they landed on the same calendar within four months of each other.

That is the actual story here, and it is easy to miss if you are only tracking the events everyone already knows about. Altos de Chavón's amphitheater still runs its own concert season, and residents don't need another rundown of who is playing there. What changed in 2026 is a few hundred yards away, at the marina, where the resort's newer event venue went from hosting private functions to anchoring a public festival circuit that didn't exist before.

Three Debuts in One Season

Start with what's genuinely new. Casa de Campo Fashion Week ran its inaugural edition in early June, with former Miss Universe Dayanara Torres as brand ambassador and Spanish designer Custo Dalmau headlining the closing runway. The lineup leaned heavily Dominican: Giannina Azar, Jenny Polanco, Maylé Vásquez, Gaby Alvarez, José Cristian Lagares, Rafael Rivero and Anna Redman Pablo all showed collections across the four-day run, which mixed runway programming with wellness sessions and a photography exhibition at Galería Chavón. It was the resort's first attempt at anything like this, and by the time it wrapped, Caribbean Journal was already calling it a new fixture on the region's fashion calendar rather than a one-off.

Three weeks after that, the marina turned into something closer to a trade show for tobacco and rum. Cigars in Paradise ran June 25 through 28, its own first-ever edition, pulling in 28 cigar and rum brands from the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Honduras, including names like Arturo Fuente, Davidoff and Montecristo. Guests toured the Casa Brugal distillery in nearby San Pedro, sat in on seminars moderated by Cigar Snob editor Erik Calviño and industry veteran George Brightman, and closed out evenings with rum pairings at La Marina. The organizers were direct about what they were building. As Jason Kycek, the resort's chief marketing officer, put it:

"Cigars in Paradise is more than a festival, it's a celebration of artistry set against the unmatched beauty and hospitality of our resort."

That first edition sold out enough interest that a second, golf-focused version is scheduled for November 11 through 15, this one capped at 72 players across four days of rounds at Teeth of the Dog, Dye Fore and The Links, each paired with cigars.

The One That Isn't New, and Why That Matters

Not everything on this year's calendar is a debut, and the distinction is worth making because it changes what the pattern actually means. The Casa de Campo Food & Wine Festival returns October 9 and 10 for its fourth year, not its first. What's notable is how much it has grown rather than that it exists at all. This year's edition is bringing Michael Mina, Hubert Keller, Joe Isidori and Top Chef finalist Adam Pawlak, with Univision personality Raúl de Molina hosting, and organizers are projecting more than 3,000 attendees across eight chefs and over 30 food, wine and spirits exhibitors, up from prior years. Resort president Andrés Pichardo Rosenberg described this edition as building on three years of momentum rather than starting from scratch, and the festival package, which runs from $650 per person per night for stays October 9 through 11, reflects an event the resort is scaling up, not testing.

So the honest read is this: one established festival got bigger, and two brand-new ones appeared alongside it, all inside a single calendar year, all routed through the same venue. That's a different kind of growth than a resort simply adding another golf tournament or another beach party night.

Here's how the year actually lays out:

Winter Still Belongs to Polo, But It Isn't Alone Anymore

For most of Casa de Campo's history, the January-to-April stretch was the marquee period, built around the Polo Challenge, the Caribbean's most significant polo tournament, played on the resort's three tournament fields since Maharajah Jabar Singh helped establish the sport here in 1974. This year's edition closed on April 9, with La Romanza-3J beating the home Casa de Campo side 12-7 in the final. That tournament still owns the winter.

What's different is that June and October now carry programming heavy enough to matter in their own right, on a property that used to go quiet between golf season and hurricane season. A fashion week, a cigar festival and a growing food festival didn't replace polo season. They gave the marina a second and third season that used to be empty months on the calendar.

What Actually Changes for Someone Already Living Here

None of this requires attending every event to notice the shift. The practical version is simpler: expect the marina to be busier and harder to book around these specific windows, particularly at restaurants along Plaza Portofino during Food & Wine Festival weekend, when the resort is pulling in outside visitors specifically for the tasting pavilion and the Dinner Under the Stars at Minitas Beach Club. If you're planning a dinner reservation or a golf cart route through the marina in early June or the second weekend of October, building in extra time isn't excessive caution anymore, it's just accurate.

The other shift is less about scheduling and more about what the marina is becoming. A venue built for corporate meetings and weddings is now the resort's primary stage for public-facing lifestyle programming, three events deep in a single year. Whether that becomes a permanent fixture of the Casa de Campo calendar or settles back down after a debut year is worth watching, but the direction is clear enough already. The marina isn't waiting for the amphitheater's schedule anymore. It's running its own.

For residents who want a closer read on what's landing next at Casa de Campo, or want to talk through how these changes are shaping demand at the marina and along the Chavón, Christie's International Real Estate Dominican Republic tracks these shifts as they happen. Reach out to receive exclusive listings and on-the-ground updates as the season unfolds.