Grand'Anse Department
Grand'Anse's Massif de la Hotte was isolated 2.5 million years ago, creating Haiti's endemic species laboratory—but deforestation compresses 31 unique frog species into a shrinking refugium with nowhere to flee.
Grand'Anse exists because 2.5 million years ago a sea channel cut the Tiburon Peninsula off from the rest of Hispaniola, isolating the Massif de la Hotte as a biological island within an island. When populations split and can't interbreed, they diverge. Grand'Anse became Haiti's Galápagos: 900 plant species, 31 endemic frogs, 123 orchid species, and the world's highest concentration of endemic amphibians. Pic Macaya at 2,347 meters is Haiti's second-highest peak and the fifth in the Caribbean, crowned by Haiti's last primary forest—a refugium where evolution ran a parallel experiment for two million years.
The French called Jérémie, Grand'Anse's coastal capital, a secondary port for coffee and cacao. After independence, the department's remoteness—accessible mainly by sea until the 20th century—made it a haven for intellectuals fleeing Port-au-Prince's political violence. Jérémie earned the name "City of Poets": Émile Roumer, Étzer Vilaire, and dozens of Haiti's literary figures were born or worked here. Geographic isolation creates cultural distinctiveness just as it creates biological endemism.
Macaya National Park, established in 1983, occupies the upper elevations of the massif. The park shelters species found nowhere else on Earth, including the La Hotte glanded frog and dozens of Eleutherodactylus species that evolved in mountain streams unreachable except on foot. But isolation is fragile: deforestation reached even Macaya's slopes by the 1990s as charcoal production—Haiti's primary cooking fuel—consumed forest at 1.2% annually. By 2025, Macaya retains primary forest only in its most inaccessible cores, and researchers race to document species before they vanish.
In 2003, Haiti split Grand'Anse in half, creating Nippes Department from the eastern arrondissements to improve regional governance. Grand'Anse now covers the western peninsula—the Massif de la Hotte biodiversity hotspot and little else. The department remains one of Haiti's poorest and most isolated, with infrastructure damaged repeatedly by hurricanes (Matthew in 2016 destroyed 90% of Jérémie's buildings).
By 2026, Grand'Anse faces the biological paradox of refugia: isolation that protected unique species now traps them. Climate change, deforestation, and population pressure compress endemic frogs into shrinking habitat. The frogs can't migrate; the mountains are already islands. What evolution created over 2.5 million years, humans can erase in decades.