Camagüey, Cuba

Camagüey is an eccentric place. Charming, but eccentric. The city symbol is the Tinajon - a large clay pot used for storing rainwater. The vessel is tapered at the end, half-buried in the earth, and covered with a heavy lid, which keeps whatever is stored inside cool and fresh. They are all over the city, and as I take a rest during the long, hot walk to my hotel, a friendly local scoops up some water into a terracotta mug from her tinajon and offers it to me. The water is ice-cold, fresh, and reinvigorating. Muchas gracias, I smile, and then shoulder my backpack and head out of the heat.

As I walk through the town, I notice tinajones of every size, some just a few inches tall, but others big enough to sleep in. The tinajon was first brought to Cuba by the Spanish and is descended from the earthenware amphora introduced to Spain by the Romans. The Spanish used them to transport vital olive oil, which no conquistador could do without. Later, these large, impressive vessels became status symbols, and citizens of Camagüey could judge each other’s place in the social hierarchy by how impressive their tinajones were.

Writing about Camagüey is a great excuse to talk about pirates. During the golden age of piracy in the 18th Century, they terrorised the fantastically wealthy Spanish ports in Cuba. First, as agents of the British and French crowns, who paid ‘privateers’ (essentially pirates in the service of the crown) to roam the Caribbean, plundering Spanish ships transporting the unimaginable riches stolen from indigenous civilisations in the Americas. Then, as the plantations were planted and sugar, tea, coffee, and cotton made the slavers rich, pirates began to target this transatlantic commodity trade. They soon became extremely rich and powerful, forming ‘pirate republics’ and fortresses on islands such as Trinidad, and began targeting entire cities in their raids.

Camagüey is said to have been a real victim of these pirate raids. And so sometime in the late 18th Century, the town centre’s streets were replanned into a maze, with only one entrance and exit out of the city. This was meant to trap pirates here, leaving them at the mercy of the city guard and the townspeople. It seems to have worked, and after the street’s construction, the pirates moved on to softer targets, and Camagüey never suffered a raid again.

Now, I’m in the hall of the bus station, waiting to travel inland to Trinidad. A local legend here says that if a foreigner comes to Camagüey and drinks cool, fresh rainwater from a Tinajon, he will meet a beautiful woman from the city, and never leave. I look around the hall, listening out for the echo of high heels on the marble, but alas, no beauty appears. Ah, well, all aboard.