CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
The recorded total and the leg detail need reconciliation. Inspect the leg notes before using this record for timing or navigation. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
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Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
A 446 km round trip from Río Guayabal de Yateras - roughly 11 h 22 in the saddle. On the way it passes El Salvador, Archaeological Landscape of the First Coff, La Gran Piedra and San Pedro de la Roca Castle. It was put together for the scenery rather than the shortest line.
Speed drops and stays down. Park rather than crawl through. 34 km through ground somebody thought worth listing. The road passes it rather than bypassing it.
Alejandro de Humboldt National Park is generally considered the richest patch of nature in the whole Caribbean, and on a bike you approach it the hard way, through mining country and over some of the worst roads in Cuba. The park covers a huge block of mountains and rainforest in the far east of the island, between the nickel town of Moa and Baracoa, and runs down to the coast at Bahía de Taco, where a small visitor station organises guided walks and boat trips into the mangroves.
Read the complete Alejandro de Humboldt National Park write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Alejandro de Humboldt National Park is where the day begins. Next is El Salvador.
In the mountains north of Guantánamo, at the eastern end of Cuba, the Sierra del Purial and the hills around the town of El Salvador rise steeply from the dry coastal plain into a greener, cooler world of forest and coffee. At the end of the eighteenth century, French planters fleeing the slave revolution in Saint-Domingue, today's Haiti, settled in these mountains and built coffee plantations, with stone drying terraces, mills, aqueducts and grand houses, worked by enslaved Africans. The ruins of more than a hundred and seventy of these plantations survive in the Sierra Maestra and around Guantánamo, and they were listed by UNESCO in 2000 as the Archaeological Landscape of the First Coffee Plantations in the South-East of Cuba.
Read the complete El Salvador write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
El Salvador comes up 39 km in. Next is Archaeological Landscape of the First Coff.
In the hills of southeastern Cuba, between Santiago and Guantánamo, the ruins of old coffee plantations lie hidden in the forest, and they tell a remarkable story. After the slave revolution in Saint-Domingue in the 1790s, which led to the independence of Haiti, many French planters fled to Cuba with their enslaved workers, and they introduced coffee growing on a large scale in the Sierra Maestra foothills. In the nineteenth century, hundreds of cafetales were established, with mansions, drying platforms, mills, aqueducts and slave quarters, using innovative techniques adapted to the steep mountain terrain. The Archaeological Landscape of the First Coffee Plantations in the South-East of Cuba was listed by UNESCO in 2000.
Read the complete Archaeological Landscape of the First Coff write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
78 km in you reach Archaeological Landscape of the First Coff. Next is La Gran Piedra.
La Gran Piedra means simply the Great Stone, and that is exactly what waits at the top: an enormous boulder sitting on the crest of the Sierra de la Gran Piedra, over twelve hundred metres above sea level and roughly twenty kilometres east of Santiago de Cuba. You climb several hundred stone steps from the road to reach it, and a metal ladder takes you onto the rock itself. On a clear morning the view runs over forested ridges to the Caribbean on one side and inland across the Sierra Maestra on the other, and people say that on the clearest nights you can see the lights of Jamaica and Haiti.
Read the complete La Gran Piedra write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
La Gran Piedra, about halfway. Next is San Pedro de la Roca Castle.
Where the narrow mouth of Santiago de Cuba's bay meets the open Caribbean, a castle climbs the headland in terraces of stone. San Pedro de la Roca, often called simply El Morro, was designed in the seventeenth century by the Italian military engineer Giovanni Battista Antonelli, from a family that built defences across the Spanish Caribbean. It was meant to shut the door on the pirates and privateers who had sacked Santiago more than once, and its tiered batteries, drawbridges and stairs follow the rock so closely that the fortress seems carved from it. It became a World Heritage Site in 1997 as the best preserved example of Spanish-American military architecture of its type.
Read the complete San Pedro de la Roca Castle write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
San Pedro de la Roca Castle sits at 157 km, about halfway. Next is back through La Gran Piedra.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete La Gran Piedra write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through La Gran Piedra comes up 196 km in. Next is back through Archaeological Landscape of the First Coff.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Archaeological Landscape of the First Coff write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
235 km in you reach back through Archaeological Landscape of the First Coff. Next is back through El Salvador.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete El Salvador write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through El Salvador, late in the day. Next is Alejandro de Humboldt National Park.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Alejandro de Humboldt National Park write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
The route ends here after 446 km.
Alejandro de Humboldt National Park → El Salvador is 45 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
El Salvador → Archaeological Landscape of the First Coff is 44 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Archaeological Landscape of the First Coff → La Gran Piedra is 34 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
La Gran Piedra → San Pedro de la Roca Castle is 34 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
San Pedro de la Roca Castle → back through La Gran Piedra is 34 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through La Gran Piedra → back through Archaeological Landscape of the First Coff is 34 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Archaeological Landscape of the First Coff → back through El Salvador is 44 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through El Salvador → Alejandro de Humboldt National Park is 45 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.