GIBARA, The White Town

The White Town, as Gibara is commonly known, cherishes several of the architectural sites of utmost importance from a historical point of view in the province of Holguín. The Garrison ruins, for example, and the Battery of Fernando the VIIth have achieved a national relevance.

In terms of landscape, the symbol of the region is the Chair of Gibara (said to have been named thus by the Admiral Christopher Columbus due to the height's resemblance to a saddle), not to mention the attractive and very peculiar Hill of the Mosque, also baptized thus by the discoverer because of its similarity with the Peña de los Enamorados (Lover´s Knoll) in Andalucía.

Despite its charming smallness, the city is endowed with precious landscapes, given its closeness to the sea and the exuberant vegetation of its surroundings, and it is also gifted with an amazing, out of the ordinary image: two centuries of cultural and historical heritage have been preserved making Gibara the second fortified city of Cuba. Of the city's musea we must highlight the Museum of Colonial Art and the Museum of Natural History, conscious of a formidable heritage dating from the aboriginal indigenous to this date, kept in a delightfully archaic, virginal way due to the town's distant isolation in commerce and communication established during the colonial and early republican era.

Gibara is located at the northeast of Holguín, a province with 25 % of its surface covered by forests. In spite of an increased and speedy development in the branch of tourism, the region's enormous potential is still unexploited therefore it is still economically sustained by the sugar industry and the Moa nickel mineral deposits, among the main sites in the planet.

Holguín, the capital of the province, is known as the City of Parks for the number of open spaces that ornament and distinguish it. It is usually identified by the Loma de la Cruz (Hill of the Cross).