Historic Centre of Camagüey
We use the number of languages Wikipedia covers a site in as a rough measure of how well known it is. Counts of people who have stood there or want to go will appear once enough people use the app.
Seals, your want-to-go list and the year you stood here live in the iPhone app.
How it came to be
Camagüey began as Santa María del Puerto del Príncipe, one of the first seven towns founded by the Spanish in Cuba. The first settlement was made on the north coast in 1514 or 1515; it moved twice before settling for good on its present site in 1528, where a Taíno village named Camagüey had stood. The early town was square, with buildings of timber and palm.
On 15 December 1616 the town burned. From the early 17th century it was repeatedly threatened by pirate raids and tropical storms. Its people stored rainwater in great earthenware jars like those of Andalusia, the tinajones, which earned it the name City of the Earthen Jars. After a raid in 1668 the centre was rebuilt and the old square given a grid layout. Between the late 17th and early 18th centuries churches and convents went up, and neighbourhoods grew around them.
The town grew as the centre of an inland region given over to cattle and sugar. Its system of large and small squares, winding streets and irregular blocks is unusual for a Latin American colonial town on flat land. Modern sugar mills brought a new boom after 1881, and in 1978 the historic centre was declared a National Monument. The 54-hectare centre was inscribed in July 2008.
Data: Wikidata (CC0). Photos: Wikimedia Commons, under each photo’s licence. This is an early version and may contain errors. We measure usage anonymously to improve the app (PostHog, EU).