75% of players answered correctly.

THE CORRECT ANSWER: Ayiti

The term Ayiti, which literally means “land of high mountains” or “sacred land” in the Arawak language, is the original name that the Taino population gave to the entire island that Christopher Columbus later named Hispaniola.This name directly referred to the particularly rugged topography of the region, characterized by imposing mountain ranges that cross the territory from east to west. The Tainos sometimes used other names to designate their island, such as Quisqueya, meaning “big land”, or Bohio, which evoked the idea of ​​a house or large estate.After the historic independence won in 1804, the founding fathers of the first black republic in the world deliberately chose to reject the French colonial name of Saint-Domingue to re-adopt this ancestral Taino name of Haiti, thus paying a vibrant symbolic tribute to the first indigenous inhabitants decimated by colonization.