The underwater mountain sounds awesome but how often do you guys get earthquakes?
The attached National Geographic image gives you an idea of the Puerto Rican trench to the north of the island which borders on the division between the Caribbean and North American tectonic plates. You can see the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos islands have been uplifted to the north of the plate division line and to the east of TCI there are some further underwater mountains just below the surface as WW mentioned.
http://www.nationalgeographic.org/maps/puerto-rico-trench/
To the south of the island is a smaller underwater mountain range also bordering and active fault line which accounts for numerous small recent earthquakes especially near the Mona passage. Maybe something historically larger that caused a hit on the capital hundreds of years ago?
But the most problematic faults historically in DR are the so called Septentrional sideways slipping fault which runs the length of the Cibao and into the Samana Bay, and the Enriquillo Garden fault line which runs from Azua through and beyond Haiti and was responsible for the Haiti earthquake of 2010. But DR is riddled with faults and receives some 1400 earthquakes annually Richter scale 3 or more and thankfully in recent times less than 6. If something of the magnitude of the 1946 earthquake which hit somewhere near Nagua on the North Coast occurs, much of the country will be severely impacted unfortunately.
But life goes on as it does in many earthquake active zones worldwide, such as California, Japan, Indonesia, Turkey, Italy, New Zealand and so on.
Diverse exciting living opportunities don't come easy.
