At the 1938 Evian Conference Rafael Trujillo offered to accept up to 100,000 Jewish refugees; about 800 German and Austrian Jewish refugees received visas by the Dominican government between 1940 and 1945 (see Dominican Jews) and settled in Sosua. The government provided them with land and resources with which they created a dairy and cheese factory, named Productos Sosua, still in existence today. Descendants of the original settlers still live in Sosua, where they maintain a synagogue and a museum.
The town was little known until tourism took off in the island in the mid 1980s
