CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. 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.
From Guantánamo it runs 261 km to Guantánamo; allow about 4 h 58 of riding. On the way it passes 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.
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 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 comes up about 91 km into the recorded legs. 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.
about 128 km into the recorded legs you reach San Pedro de la Roca Castle. 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, 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 → La Gran Piedra is 91 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
La Gran Piedra → San Pedro de la Roca Castle is 37 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 → Niceto Pérez is 99 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.