Plaza del Carmen, a beautiful heritage site in central Cuba

If you get connected to the Internet in Cuba and with enter Plaza del Carmen in the search engine, Google will probably not send you to the Spanish city of Granada, a luxury hotel in the Dominican Republic, or famous neighborhoods in Murcia or Valencia.

Instead, the web is likely to take you among its results on a digital trip to one of the most beautiful sites of the ancient Villa de Santa Maria del Puerto del Principe, where Plaza del Carmen is described online as a "hidden gem", a "quiet place where you can breathe peace" and a "captivating cobblestone square", even in travel-related reviews posted by Tripadvisor, Visit Cuba and Cubatechtravel in which this site ranks first on their lists of attractions that the Historic Center of the city of Camagüey offers to both locals and foreigners.

What those recommended tourist guides failed to highlight is the warmth of the people who live in the surrounding houses, the joy of the children who run on the cobblestones in the afternoons, the conversations of the lovers who play at being in love with the tanned life-size sculptures made by the artist Martha Jimenez and placed there to give life to a totally open and cozy space.

The engaged couple, the three gossipmongers, the water vendor and the newspaper reader were common urban characters in the colonial era, and in them the ceramist recreated features and gestures, based on her interest in making "the spectator feel part of the work", as she once said in a radio interview.

That's why Martha's gallery-workshop could not be located anywhere else in the city but in the beautiful Plaza del Carmen, just like the only church with two towers in this heritage site—also known as the City of Churches—with its perfectly symmetrical façade, its arch over the main entrance and the marks of the time passed since it was built in the 19th century.

Among those representative of the vast religious architecture of the central region, this building is part of a set made up of the current Marta Abreu School—once a women’s hospital—and the former Ursuline Monastery, birthplace of institutional female education at local level and current Office of the Historian of the City of Camagüey and home to a branch of the University of the Arts.

The renowned researcher Marcos Tamames Henderson wrote: "Church and convent, together with the Women's Hospital, defined one of the city’s most beautiful sets of colonial buildings, hence their inclusion in the area declared Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008".

The residents of this city take pride in this and other local squares and places since more than a decade ago, when UNESCO highlighted the compound as an exceptional example of architectural ensemble that illustrates a significant historical period with an irregular urban layout, religious buildings and a monumental and domestic architecture that display the evolution of the village and remain in mint condition.