CubaPLUS Magazine

About 22,000 hectares that include keys, marine platform and firm land with beautiful coastlines, make up the natural riches of the Caguanes National Park, belonging to the central province of Sancti Spiritus. Locals like to say that it extends from Cayo Aguada to Cerrotico de Judas, to name two relevant sites of enormous and very beautiful wildlife, but the entire surface of Caguanes impresses the hiker or researcher and this has determined that it is considered an ideal place to practice ecotourism, regardless of whether It has a beginning and an end.

Declared a Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO, one of its vertebral bodies is the great cavernous system that has endowed it with about 11 km of underground galleries, many of which contain vestiges of pre-Columbian times when they were used as homes, ceremonial sites or burials by some groups of aborigines, although they used to build wooden ranches and guano roof called bohíos to use as homes. In a cave called Cueva de Ramos, the discovery was an important, beautiful cave drawing, the most notable in that environment, a work which was made 1.20 meters from the basic floor of the grotto and 20 from the entrance, and it is a kind of center in the middle of a set of 24 more pictographs.

For this reason, some scholars have given it the label of “the cathedral of rock art in Cuba¨. This valuable area of rock images enhances its importance due to the great identity of its style, despite the fact that it shows about 800 elements with drawings, something quite rare in the geographic Antillean enclave.́ By the way, the idea of placing exhibition rooms is being considered within that cave system, since within the same framework where they were created this would favor the continuity of the scientific study and would promote nature and ethnology tourism.

In sum, the Caguanes National Park has just over 60 archaeological sites, in addition to being made up of splendid marine and terrestrial ecosystems of great botanical and zoological value. The Guayabera Ciénaga is famous, where the Cuban crane, evaluated as the largest bird in our country. It is also sensational because they can be observed in properties of up to 200 species of animals and plants, 24 of them endemic. Kingdom of avifauna, more than 112 species of birds reproduce in their forests.

The locals also pride themselves on having the butterfly bat (the smallest in the world), because there is a notable registered population. . Luckily for vacationers, Caguanes is not far from others tourist sites turned paradise beaches in the north of Cuba such as the Santa María, Las Brujas and Ensenachos keys, north of Villa Clara, from where links can be established to the most enjoyable complete of that spell enclave.