Holguin is an understated city with few visitors as most travellers are on their way to the white sands and blue seas of the Guardalavaca coast with its beach resorts. But for those who linger a while there are plenty of things to do, and an annual religious parade with cultural events worth coming to town for.
Holguin is known as the city of parks. The central plaza, Calixto Garcia, is ringed by the city’s most handsome buildings. These include La Periquera, the Parrot Cage, which houses the provincial history museum stuffed with all sorts of archaeological and historic finds, and the dominant Wenceslao Infante art deco theatre, dating from 1939, now called the Eddy Suñol Theater. Check the board outside for events.
Parque Calixto Garcia
Nearby is the Natural History Museum inside a handsome building. The highlight, here, is the incredible collection of polymitas, endemic snails that call eastern Cuba their home. The collection – numbering more than a staggering 70,000 – features the brightly coloured striped polymita picta. In 2022, this colourful Cuban snail won ‘Mollusc of the Year”. The prize? The snail’s sex organs were to go under the microscope to enhance human understanding of its reproduction skills!
The museum’s Victorian-style cabinetry also features lots of taxidermized creatures including two of the fabled critically endangered Ivory-billed Woodpeckers which many birders hope is not in fact extinct in their traditional home forests of eastern Cuba.
The city’s Plaza de la Marqueta is close by. This revived 19th-century market area is full of cafes and bars and regular live music from Thursdays to Sundays. Listen out for trova, soloists, children’s ballet, bolero, electronic music, and disco.
North of town is the Loma de la Cruz, Hill of the Cross. It’s a bit of a climb – 468 steps – to the top, but the views are panoramic. The hill has ancient history, but the steps were not completed until May 3, 1950. Each May 3, Holguin prepares for the Romerías de la Cruz de Mayo with a procession up the hill (http://www.romeriasdemayo.cult.cu/). Down in the city, holguineros celebrate the romerías with music, dance, and art events throughout the city.
Those that don’t want to climb the steps can get a taxi. Another beautiful viewpoint – this time of the palm-tree studded valley of Holguín – can be found from the terrace of the Mirador de Mayabe hotel, southeast of the city.
Valley of Holguin
Holguin is the gateway, too, to pretty Gibara, a quiet and attractive seaside town with caves to explore as well as sinkholes for snorkelling and diving. It comes alive once a year in August when the town hosts the Gibara International Film Festival. In the region, find the Museo El Chorro de Maita, an extraordinary ancient indigenous cemetery, the roaming African wildlife at beach escape Cayo Saetía, the pine forests, frogs, birds, and butterflies of Pinares de Mayarí, and the Castro brothers’ birthplace, their father’s large farm complex, in Birán, now a fascinating museum.
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