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.
391 km from Guantánamo to Guantánamo, about 7 h 49 of riding. The stops in between: Alejandro de Humboldt National Park, San Pedro de la Roca Castle and back through Alejandro de Humboldt National Park. The line favours views over speed.
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 is where the day begins. Next is Alejandro de Humboldt National Park.
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 comes up 104 km in. 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.
208 km in you reach San Pedro de la Roca Castle. Next is back through 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.
back through Alejandro de Humboldt National Park, late in the day. Next is 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 at Niceto Pérez. That is the ride.
Niceto Pérez → Alejandro de Humboldt National Park is 65 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Alejandro de Humboldt National Park → San Pedro de la Roca Castle is 142 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
San Pedro de la Roca Castle → back through Alejandro de Humboldt National Park is 142 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
back through Alejandro de Humboldt National Park → Niceto Pérez is 65 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.