We are on the move again today, for some reason we were up and ready early which as it turned out was a good thing because our taxi driver was 15 minutes early. I think he was on a bit of a mission or he wanted to get back home again quickly as we seemed to do the whole journey at light speed! He was obviously of the belief that if you take off on one bump and you are going fast enough you will miss loads on the way before you land at the other one. This should have been a 3 hour journey but it definitely didn’t take that long which meant we were at the hotel earlier than expected. Holguin is a small town which is why we are only staying one night but all the same we have a walk to do around the town so after dropping our bags in the room and picking up the information we set off. Luckily we didn’t have the problems of yesterday and managed to head off in the right direction and our first stop which is Parque Las Flores. This is a park dedicated to General Julio Grave de Peralta who led an uprising against Spain in October 1868. There is a statue of him in the centre of the square, on the far side is the ‘Mural de Origen’ which depicts the development of Holguin and Cuba from indigenous times to the end of slavery, this was significantly nicer than the wall painting we saw in Viñales Valley, the other side of the square has the Catedral de San Isidore which was only consecrated as a cathedral in 1979 although it was built in 1720 where the first mass was held in the city. This square is also home to an ice cream shop but this one seemed to need you to bring your own vessel to put the ice cream in so we didn’t have one. We walked round to Plaza de La Marquita which was laid out in 1848 and rebuilt in 1918. The key feature of this square apart from the central market which should contain artisan stalls and cafe’s but seemed to be closed like a lot of Cuba is the totem poles and bronze statues. The telephone poles have elaborate carvings and they have some great statues including one where a woman is leaning over the balcony. We stopped here for lunch and had a nice selection of tapas then continued our walk to Parque Calixto Garcia which was originally called the Plaza de Armas and for many years was the towns market place and meeting point. It now contains a statue of General Calixto Garcia after whom the square is now named. The square is surrounded by classical buildings that were home to a number of Spanish merchants. There is also the Teatro Comandante Eddy Sunol which was built in the 1939 very much in the Art Deco style. During the ten year war some of the buildings were converted into barracks for the Spanish army and the square became known as La Periquera or Parrot Cage after the brightly coloured uniforms of the Spanish Army! We walked to the final park in the centre of Holguin which is San Jose Park and is actually the youngest park. There was a supermarket here so we decided we would pop in and buy some more coffee as we are running out, that was definitely an experience as you have to queue as the counter that sells the product you want, it wasn’t too much of a problem for us as we only use CUC but the locals have both CUP and CUC and they look quite similar we have previously been told the main difference is the CUP have people and the CUC have buildings but they are the same colour and size, they also have to pay 25 CUP for every CUC so something that is 10 CUC is actually 250 CUP and they mostly seem to have coins so it takes ages to count out the right amount and there also seemed to be a restriction on how much of certain things they could buy and stock cubes were obviously in today as they all seemed to be buying 8 stock cubes from a box that the woman working behind the counter counted out, all in all an interesting experience but something that would drive you mad if you lived here. From this square there is also a good view of Lima de la Cruz or the Hill of the Cross, this is about 3km from town and consists of 458 steps to the top. The cross was placed there on 3rd May 1790 to mark the area as a Spanish town, later it was used to lay out the town but I think some of the instructions may have been lost in translation by the time they got down to ground level as it is still a bit muddled. The church on the edge of the square was built in 1752 by a group of Franciscan monks who moved to Holguin with the aim of constructing a Franciscan Covent in the city from which they would teach the children to read and write, unfortunately they were denied the approval for building a convent so built the church instead. It was totally funded by the inhabitants of Holguin and was built between 1815 and 1819, the tower was used by the independence as a lookout during the revolution. Finally we walked back to the hotel via Casa Natal Calixto Garcia who was born in this house in 1839, he had a much simpler house than the other revolutionary hero we saw yesterday who had a very grand mansion, this house was much simpler and to be honest looked quite basic. Finally we headed back to the hotel where we sat in the courtyard as it is relatively cool and had a refreshing drink or two. We have picked a restaurant for this evening but I am not sure if we will actually go back there as it is a lovely setting but the menu was a little limited so we may walk round and see what else we can find before moving on again tomorrow.
