Cuba's first city and its most remote — where Columbus planted his cross in 1492, chocolate grows wild in the mountains, and the road only arrived in 1965
Baracoa is a city of 80,000 at the eastern tip of Cuba's Guantánamo Province, the oldest Spanish settlement in the Americas — founded by Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar in 1511 on a bay believed to be where Columbus first landed in Cuba in 1492. Cut off from the rest of Cuba by the Sierra de Purial mountains until the La Farola highway was completed in 1965, Baracoa developed its own distinct culture: a rich chocolate and coconut cuisine (unlike the rest of Cuba), an Afro-Cuban musical tradition (the Tumba Francesa), and a Taíno indigenous heritage richer than anywhere else in Cuba. El Yunque, the…
Baracoa's isolation — the most effective barrier to Spanish colonial homogenisation in Cuba — is what preserved its extraordinary cultural diversity. The Taíno population was not completely wiped out here as elsewhere, and their descendants (the Guajiro communities) maintained a distinct genetic and cultural presence for centuries longer than in other parts of the island. The city was Cuba's first capital before Havana, but after Velázquez moved the administrative capital westward in 1515, Baracoa's isolation became a defining condition — it never grew into a plantation economy dependent on e…