The small white wooden church above Samaná's waterfront is one of the more unusual historical buildings in the country. Built in the 1820s for the African American freedmen who settled in Samaná on the invitation of Haitian president Jean-Pierre Boyer, it is officially the African Methodist Episcopal Church but everyone knows it as La Churcha, an English-influenced corruption of the Spanish church.
The congregation still includes descendants of those settlers, who speak a creolised English-Spanish dialect among themselves. Sunday services are open to visitors and the hymns are sung in English. The interior is plain, but the building itself — the original prefabricated structure shipped down in pieces from the United States — is the attraction.