Santiago de Cuba City

Santiago de Cuba is the second more important city of Cuba. Located in the east part of the island, it was the last of the first seven villages, founded in 1515 by the Spanish conqueror Diego Velazquez de CuГ©llar.

Santiago de Cuba is hot, hilly and exhausting but at the same time seductively languid. Built on a sequence of hills overlooking a large bay with the Sierra Maestra in the background, it is certainly one of Cuba's most picturesque cities. Its colourful streets sweep up and down steep hills, making walking through the city, although pleasant, a little tiring if done in long stretches.

Santiago has a singular vibrancy. It’s very plentiful the mulatto people, a mix of Spanish, French from Haiti and huge numbers of Africans, which they are persistently friendly.

Santiago de Cuba is considered to be the most Caribbean of cities in Cuba and is the traditional site of two important popular festivities: the Carnivals and the Fiesta del Fuego, or Feast of Fire.

It has plenty to offer for sightseers, blessed as it is with a host of interesting museums, buildings and places (Moncada Headquarters, Emilio Bacardi Museum, The Cathedral "Nuestra SeГ±ora de la AsunciГіn", Morro Castle, La Maison, Enramadas Street ...)

 figures like a perfect formula for the lovers of the tourism in combination with a well conserved nature. This well-known park has a lot of attractiveness where you can find the famous stone zoo inside the well-known Valley of the Prehistory, the Museum of Car, the Aquarium and the Green Grassy Area of the Sculptures.

The Sanctuary of the Virgin of the Charity of the El Cobre, patron saint of the island, is a well-known and much frequented place where every year thousands people go in search of the hope to try make come true their dreams.

In the surroundings of the city, La Gran Piedra - registered as the biggest stone of the world in the record Guinness book - it is erected majestic and imposing, with its near 70 thousand tons located about a thousand 220 meters over the sea level.

The capital city has an unmistakable mark of a splendid bay, surrounded by mountains, watched by the Morro or San Pedro de la Roca castle, declared this last one by UNESCO in 1997 as a World Heritage Site.

This city has the necessary infrastructure to become a major site of tourism of events and congresses. And its mountains and maritime surroundings render it appropriate, too, for the enjoinment of nature tourism and tourism of adventure as well, for nautical activities, cruising, and health tourism.