Santiago de Cuba reaffirms brand of its six cultural landscapes

With the pride of six cultural landscapes as a mark of identity, Santiago de Cuba celebrated the 501st anniversary of the granting of the title of city and today is committed to exalting it with work and efforts.
 
Body: Omar López, director of the Office of the City Conservator (OCC), who recently turned 26, affirmed that these emblematic spaces are a priority in the work of the entity, in charge of ensuring their sustainability over time , which spans centuries.

Among those emblematic sites in Cuba and beyond are the town of El Cobre as an associative landscape, with its transcendent footprints in mining, from one of the oldest enclaves of this type in Latin America, linked to copper exploitation.

To this are added the edges of the confrontation with slavery, with the Monument to the Cimarrón, by the sculptor Alberto Lescay, which recognizes the place then known as Santiago del Prado as the site of the first uprisings against that scourge on the Island.

The third component of that lineage alludes to religion, as the Sanctuary of the Virgin of Charity, Patron Saint of Cuba in the Catholic creed, is located there.

As for the underwater heritage there are treasures submerged in the coast, as remnants of the naval battle that ended the Spanish-Cuban-North American war in July 1898, while in the urban historic center they exhibit its valuable attributes and old buildings.

The classifications as fossil, fortified and funerary correspond to the other three landscapes that make people of Santiago proud, which in the first case refers to the archaeological panorama of the old French coffee plantations in the south-east, declared a World Heritage Site.

Also with this world category is the Castle of San Pedro de la Roca del Morro, a sentinel at the entrance of the bay, which qualifies as a fortified treasure, as part of a group of forts built by the Spanish to protect themselves from attack by corsairs, pirates and other dangers.

The patrimonial cemetery of Santa Ifigenia, a National Monument and the oldest in the archipelago, becomes a funerary landscape and as an open-air museum it contains valuable pieces of that art and a transcendent sample of Cuban culture and development.