CubaPLUS Magazine

If you want to stay in Camagüey, you only have to drink water from a tinajón

By: CubaPLUS Magazine, photos: Rodolfo Blanco Cué & José (Tito) Meriño
Aug 19, 2024
If you want to stay in Camagüey, you only have to drink water from a tinajón

Camagüey, one of the oldest cities in Cuba, boasts one of the most representative city legends that says: “if you drink water from a tinajón, you will stay in Camagüey”, as it has its origin in the remarkable representativeness of that pot-bellied and reddish container.

Closely related to the Andalusian vase or the cistern, and for which the city is known as the city of tinajones, historians point out that this characteristic container proliferated in the town from the abundance of clay that the Spanish immigrants found when they settled there.

In this town, whose oldest part of its historic center has been a World Heritage Site since 2008, the plump Camagüeyan tinajón, besides being the symbol of the demarcation, is one of the objects around which, over the centuries, this legend was woven, part of the local idiosyncrasy.

02-camaguey-tinajon-1.jpgAccording to several historians, in the former Villa de Santa María del Puerto del Príncipe, today Camagüey, this vessel was seen for the first time at the dawn of the 17th century, imported from distant Spain by the colonizers of Cuba, particularly by those who came from the south of that European nation —for centuries under the conquest and influence of the Arabs—.

However, its oldest description dates back to 1760. Used to store grains, oil and wine, the container quickly became popular in the typical patios and gardens of Camagüey for its use to store rainwater, since clay, a very abundant raw material in this demarcation, allowed to preserve like no other material the freshness of the precious liquid. Once the spring rains began, through the systems of channels hanging from the red roofs of baked clay, first of wood and later of metal, the water was collected, a somewhat scarce resource in these lands due to the predominantly dry soil conditions throughout the province.

Although Camagüey was not the only place where pottery jars were made between 1863 and 1866, since there were other potters in Sancti Spíritus and Santiago de Cuba, there was no production center similar to the one in Principeño, stated the Spanish writer and historian Jacobo de la Pezuela y Lobo in his Dictionary of geography, statistics and history of the island of Cuba.

The intellectual from Havana, Antonio Bachiller y Morales, during his visit to the town in 1838, also wrote in his memoirs about the pottery jar: There are not many cisterns; the water is collected in beautiful jars placed in the patios, and because of their large number, four or six of them will contain the amount of water in a cistern.

By the middle of that same century, the existence of tinajones in local homes was already considered exaggerated, and their manufacture gradually ceased, since in 1900 alone there were already more than 16,000 units in the town of Puerto Príncipe, data obtained through an inventory carried out there by the North American authorities who occupied the island, after the end of the war between Cuba and Spain.

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