Boca Chica was originally developed by Juan Bautista Vicini Burgos, who established sugar plantations there in the early twentieth century. Vicini was very fond of the place but the golden era of Boca Chica was in the 1950s, when dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo ordered the construction of a modern hotel named "Hotel Hamaca", which subsequently became something of an icon. The hotel got all the more famous because it was there that Trujillo granted asylum to Fulgencio Batista after the Cuban Revolution. The Hamaca was closed almost immediately after Trujillo was killed in May 1961, and it remained closed and abandoned for more than twenty years. It was reopened in the early 1990s.
During the 1950s and the 1960s, prominent families of the Dominican Republic built several summer properties along the beach only accessible by private transportation. After the 1970s, the beach became more and more popular and public transportation helped to make Boca Chica a very populated beach; it was no longer secluded and quiet, as it had been during the '50s and '60s
