Baracoa, Guantánamo Province
Founded in 1511 as the first Spanish settlement in Cuba, Baracoa sits at the island's far eastern tip, cut off from the rest of the country by the Sierra del Purial mountains until a coastal road was finally carved through the cliffs in the 1960s. That isolation preserved something rare: a town that tastes, sounds and feels like nowhere else in Cuba, with its own cuisine built on coconut and cacao
The Town Itself
Baracoa's Malecón is a fraction of Havana's but arguably more charming — a short promenade of pastel wooden houses facing a bay backed by the flat-topped mountain El Yunque, which Columbus described in his 1492 diary as a distinctive landmark. The 16th-century Catedral de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción on Parque Independencia houses the Cruz de la Parra, a wooden cross believed to be the oldest European relic in the Americas.
The town's culinary identity is built on products that barely feature in the rest of Cuba. Cucurucho — a sweet paste of coconut, honey, fruit and sometimes cacao, sold wrapped in a palm-leaf cone — is eaten as a snack on every corner. Restaurants serve freshwater shrimp from the Toa River, fresh cacao chocolate bars made by local cooperatives, and fish in coconut milk sauces that would not be out of place in coastal Colombia.
El Yunque and the Río Toa
The hike to the summit of El Yunque (575 m) takes about four hours return through dense rainforest and is best done with a local guide arranged through the Casa de la Cultura or any casa particular in town. The summit is often cloud-wrapped but when it clears the view over Baracoa Bay and the Atlantic coastline is extraordinary — green mountains, white surf, red-roofed town.
The Río Toa, Cuba's largest river by volume, flows through primary rainforest west of Baracoa and can be explored by kayak or on guided river walks. The forest here shelters the Polymita picta, a land snail with a shell that comes in wild combinations of yellow, red, white and black — it is endemic to this corner of Cuba and has been called the most beautiful snail in the world. Look for them on tree bark after rain.
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