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.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
A 319 km round trip from Guantánamo - roughly 6 h 20 in the saddle. On the way it passes Niceto Pérez, La Gran Piedra, San Pedro de la Roca Castle and back through La Gran Piedra. 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.
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 is where the day begins. Next is Niceto Pérez.
Niceto Pérez is a rural municipality in the hills just west of the city of Guantánamo, in the far east of Cuba, a region of sugar cane, small farms and mountains rising towards the Sierra Maestra and the coffee country of the Gran Piedra. It is not a place that features in many guidebooks, and that is part of its interest. The surrounding hills hold the remains of the coffee plantations established in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by French planters fleeing the revolution in Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, and the archaeological landscape of those first coffee plantations in the south east of Cuba is listed by UNESCO.
Read the complete Niceto Pérez write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Niceto Pérez comes up 36 km in. 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.
71 km in you reach La Gran Piedra. 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, 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 sits at 142 km, about halfway. Next is back through Niceto Pérez.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Niceto Pérez write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Niceto Pérez comes up 178 km in. Next is 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.
El Salvador closes the day.
El Salvador → Niceto Pérez is 25 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Niceto Pérez → La Gran Piedra is 47 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
La Gran Piedra → San Pedro de la Roca Castle is 35 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 35 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through La Gran Piedra → back through Niceto Pérez is 47 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Niceto Pérez → El Salvador is 25 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.