This city, in Guantanamo Province, is the oldest Spanish settlement on the island of Cuba. It was the first of seven villages founded by Spanish Conquistador Diego Velazquez de Cuellar in the early 1510’s. It is believed that the town is located on the exact spot where Christopher Columbus landed in cuba on his first voyage. Its name stems from the indigenous Arawac language and means “the presence of the sea.”

 

It lies on the Bahia de Miel or Bay of Honey and is surrounded by a wide mountain range, causing the city to be quite isolated but for the road built in the 1960s connecting this remote areas to the rest of the province.