Cafetal Francés La Isabélica
Santiago de Cuba
A restored mountain coffee estate, high on the Gran Piedra road.
Coffee & cacao
The mountain plantations of the east, and Cuba's chocolate town
Coffee came to the eastern mountains at the end of the eighteenth century and was planted on terraces cut into slopes too steep for cane. What survives up there — drying floors, aqueducts, the stone footings of the estate houses — is unusual enough that UNESCO listed the whole landscape in 2000. Cacao is the other mountain crop, concentrated around Baracoa in the far east, where the road only arrived in the 1960s and the chocolate is still made in town.
The coffee ruins are reached from Santiago into the Sierra Maestra, and are a mountain day rather than a stop. Baracoa is the cacao end — the town itself, and the farms on the river valleys behind it.
Where it comes from
The first coffee plantations
Guantánamo →A World Heritage landscape since 2000: terraces, drying floors and aqueducts on slopes too steep for anything else.
Municipalities: Sierra Maestra slopes, Santiago and Guantánamo provinces
Baracoa and the cacao valleys
Guantánamo →Cuba's cacao country and its oldest town, reachable overland only since the Farola pass road of the 1960s.
Municipalities: Baracoa
Open on the mapPlaces to visit
Real, mapped places where the work happens — factories, curing barns, estates, quarries. Each one opens on the atlas map at its own coordinate.
Cafetal Buena Vista
Candelaria
Terraces and drying floors in the Sierra del Rosario.
Cafetal San Ildefonso
Candelaria
Stone ruins of a hillside coffee estate, deep in the forest.
Fábrica de Chocolate
Baracoa
The town chocolate works, near the mouth of the Toa.
Where to buy it
Counters, markets and shops you can actually walk into, with the town each one is in.
Dulceria La Criolla
Baracoa
Baracoa's sweet counter — cacao and coconut, made in town.
Museums & things to do
The museums, trails and music halls that grew up around it.
La Gran Piedra
Santiago de Cuba
The great rock above the coffee mountains, reached by a stair.
Ruta a La Gran Piedra
Santiago de Cuba
The trail up through the old plantation belt.
Sendero del Cacao
Baracoa
A short walk through cacao, coconut and palm.
Finca Duaba
Baracoa
A farm visit on the Duaba river, cacao pods and all.
Places from OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL). Information only — CubaAtlas maps these places, it does not represent or transact with any of them.