Baracoa

Introducing Baracoa

Mystical, alluring, and oh-so alive: Baracoa - a small windswept coastal town perched improbably on Cuba's eastern tip - is undoubtedly one of the island's most rewarding travel destinations.

For the first-time visitor, getting there is half the fun. From its summit high up in the Sierra del Puril, the winding form of La Farola (the lighthouse road) snakes its way precipitously downward through a rugged landscape of gray granite cliffs and pine-scented cloud forest until it falls, with eerie suddenness, upon the lush tropical paradise of the Atlantic coastline. Columbus first came here in 1492 and described it as the most beautiful land he had ever set eyes upon. Che Guevara dropped by five centuries later and opened up the area's first major industrial complex, a still-functioning chocolate factory. Other long-standing admirers include Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier, who based his book La Consagración de la Primavera on Baracoa-based Russian émigré Magdalena Rovieskuya; and the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez whose fantastical settlement of Macondo in the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude has often been likened to the town - except that Baracoa's solitude lasted a good four hundred years longer than Macondo's. In fact, so remote was this most ethereal of Cuban municipalities that, until the opening of La Farola in 1964, the only way to reach it was via the sea.

Not that this has detracted in any way from Baracoa's rich historical heritage; a legacy that has seen it elevated, by turns, into Cuba's first colonial settlement (founded in 1511), to its first capital (briefly from 1511 to 1515), to its first font of revolutionary activism (courtesy of a local Indian chief called Hatuey who rose up against the marauding Spanish in 1512).

Today the premier attractions in Baracoa include trekking up mysterious El Yunque - the town's flat-topped mountain - or indulging in the ultimate down-to-earth dining experience in the Paladar Colonial, a laid-back family-run restaurant that boasts, arguably, some of the best food to be found in Cuba.

Last updated: Jun 7, 2011