CubaPLUS Magazine

It is a beautiful and enchanting coastline where myths have been born and enrich the life of Santa Cruz del Norte, in the province of Mayabeque. If you leave Havana heading to Matanzas or Varadero, on the highway maritime route named Vía Blanca, even before reaching this, you will identify the old Peñón del Fraile, where today stands a cozy tourist hostel.

You won't regret stopping along the way. If you do, you can enjoy besides the beautiful landscape on the edge of the unique rock, you can have a piña colada, juice or cocktail, reputed to be among the best in Cuba and you will learn about a beautiful legend. The story about the friar and the nun is one of the most remembered in an area that keeps several myths transmitted from generation to generation, of those wild places in which the sea and the trade winds and terrestrials give the most satisfaction. The locals do not like to forget their deepest traditions.

This one we are talking about is one of the most beautiful legends, because it tells the origin of two hills very close to the long sea shore that accompanies travelers for most of the way to the great Blue Beach. Specifically, they rise at the entrance to the very charming beach of Jibacoa, beautiful and with comfortable services.

The Peñón del Fraile is a very rustic, rough looking structure and square, as is to be expected in a subject very worked on by the continuous erosion of natural elements. While the one known as The Nun, also being a faithful work of Nature, sometimes seems like a more delicate sculpture, although also very wild. They are not together, in the distance from the Monja point you can see the stone that is ¨El Fraile¨ , undaunted and even with a certain arrogant air, not expected in a being like him.

However, he seem to look after the delicate Nun. Those supposed human figures turned into hard geology They represent the love story of a man and a woman from yesteryear. who saw their dreams of love frustrated by prejudice and misunderstandings of his time. Understanding that their life together was impossible, they chose to take religious habits. He decided to become a priest and she a nun.

However, both came to that place to contemplate each other from afar, without ever coming together, in that lonely place, mute and desperately impossible and at the same time a chaste act of love. Until one day they were petrified in the position in which they were. They watched each other in the distance.

On moonlit nights, when it is already very late, they come to life and a friar can be seen slowly leaving his place and go to pay his respects to the beautiful nun, too transformed by exceptional magic. The wonderful man brushes his lips against the back of the girl's hand. Then both turn back into bare stone, under the light of the very clear night.