The motor hums low as the boat slips out of Sabana de la Mar harbor, the town’s clapboard roofs shrinking behind you and a green wall of mangrove branches reaching for the sky. Inside Los Haitises, the water narrows into channels that force you to lean forward—roots and trunks press close enough to see barnacles and fiddler crabs at eye level, and light slices through like a spotlight on the limestone ribs of distant islands. Your guide, a local trained alongside biologists, points to a dark lip where a cave mouth yawns and says, simply, “There are pictographs here.”