Santiago de Cuba
This 19th-century colonial with brick walls and museum-worthy furniture is a temple to all things Santería. The three guest rooms feature brass beds with quilts, the upstairs option the most private. All types stay here: santeros (priests of Santería), backpackers and foreign students studying for PhDs on the Regla de Ocha. With encyclopedic knowledge of Afro-Cuban religions, Maruchi can organize presentations.
The food is legendary, and the fecund courtyard equally sublime.
Castillo de San Pedro de la Roca del Morro
4.78 MILES
A Unesco World Heritage site since 1997, the San Pedro fort sits impregnably atop a 60m-high promontory at the entrance to Santiago harbor, 10km southwest…
0.59 MILES
The museum inside the Cuartel Moncada is the best in town and one of the best in Cuba. Sometimes gory exhibits catalogue the details of the 1953 attack by…
1.04 MILES
Nestled peacefully on the city's western extremity, the Cementerio Santa Ifigenia is second only to Havana's Necrópolis Cristóbal Colón in its importance…
Catedral de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción
0.31 MILES
Santiago's most important church is stunning both inside and out. There has been a cathedral on this site since the city's inception in the 1520s, though…
0.58 MILES
Santiago's famous Moncada Barracks, a crenelated art deco building completed in 1938, is now synonymous with one of history's greatest failed putsches…
Museo de Ambiente Histórico Cubano
0.28 MILES
The oldest house still standing in Cuba, this arresting early colonial abode dating from 1522 was the official residence of the island's first governor,…
0.51 MILES
This gorgeous yellow colonial-style building houses a museum detailing the underground struggle against Batista in the 1950s. It's a fascinating, if…
13.74 MILES
The hub of the Unesco World Heritage site bestowed in 2000 upon the First Coffee Plantations in the Southeast of Cuba is this impressive two-story stone…
1. Casa Museo de Frank y Josué País
0.11 MILES
Integral to the success of the revolution, the young País brothers organized the underground section of the M-26-7 (26th of July Movement) in Santiago de…
2. Memorial de Vilma Espín Guillois
0.17 MILES
This erstwhile home of Cuba's former 'first lady,' Vilma Espín, the wife of Raúl Castro, and instrumental force in the success of the Cuban Revolution,…
0.18 MILES
This crumbling three-nave, 18th-century ecclesiastical gem is situated three blocks north of Parque Céspedes.
4. Iglesia de Nuestra Señora del Carmen
0.2 MILES
You can dig deeper into Santiago's ecclesiastical history in this tumbledown construction, a hall church dating from the 1700s that is the final resting…
5. Museo-Casa Natal de Antonio Maceo
0.22 MILES
This important museum is where the mulato general and hero of both Wars of Independence was born, on June 14, 1845, and exhibits highlights of Maceo's…
0.25 MILES
Situated opposite the Bacardí Museum, the equally Hellenic provincial government seat is another building from Cuba's 20th-century neoclassical revival…
0.26 MILES
The neoclassical Ayuntamiento was erected in the 1950s using a design from 1783 and was once the site of Hernán Cortés’ mayoral office. Fidel Castro…
8. Museo Municipal Emilio Bacardí Moreau
0.27 MILES
Narrow Pío Rosado links Calle Heredia to Calle Aguilera and the fabulous Grecian facade of the Bacardí Museum. Founded in 1899 by the rum-magnate war hero…