Guantanamo and the Zoologico de Piedra

A Provincial City Known Worldwide For A Naval Base Nobody Can Visit And A Song, Holding The Home Of Changui And A Hillside Carved Into Three Hundred Animals By A Self Taught Farmer · Guantanamo, Guantanamo

Guantanamo is known to the world for two things it cannot really show you - a naval base no visitor may enter, and a song about a country girl from here. What it does have sits twenty kilometres out at Boqueron, where a farmer called Angel Iñigo Blanco began carving animals directly into the rock and boulders of a hillside in 1977 and did not stop. There are more than three hundred of them now, life-size, and the remarkable thing is that he had never seen most of the animals he was carving; he worked from books and magazines, which is why the elephants and the gorillas are subtly, movingly wrong. His family still adds to it. The city itself is plain, but it is the home of changui - the older, rougher country music that son grew out of - and the place to hear it, at the Casa de la Trova on a night somebody local tells you about. The city sits on the road between Santiago and Baracoa, so almost everyone passes through it anyway and almost nobody stops.

Parque Marti, Guantanamo, and Zoologico de Piedra, Boqueron, Guantanamo, Guantanamo, Cuba

The city squares are open at all times; the Casa de la Trova and the municipal museum keep their own hours. THE ZOOLOGICO DE PIEDRA at Boqueron, about twenty kilometres north-east, is open daylight hours with a small charge and is run by the carver's family. THE US NAVAL BASE CANNOT BE VISITED. Access to the Mirador de Malones, from which it could once be viewed, has varied and is not assured.

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