Cuban Nature

Though perhaps not associated to our image of the country as much or as immediately as elements of its culture or political history, Cuba's natural characteristics - and peculiarities - are hugely interesting in more ways than one.

The largest island in the Caribbean, Cuba is a chiefly flat country with rolling plains, rocky hills and three major mountain ranges (in the southeast). In addition to beautiful white sand beaches, mangroves and marshes can be found along its coasts.

Much of Cuba's arable land (three quarters of the island's area is fertile) is accessible to harbors, facilitating the transportation of agricultural produce for shipment abroad. This makes Cuba unique among Caribbean nations.

From the point of view of biodiversity, the island is also unmatched in the region: boasting some 16,500 animal species (including strange creatures like the world's smallest bird and frog) and more than 6,300 native flowering species, more than half of the country's life-forms are endemic to Cuba - that is, found nowhere else in the world.

The reason behind this is just as interesting as the fact itself: millions of years ago, Cuba was located, not in the Caribbean, but in the Pacific ocean. As a result of tectonic forces, the island was slowly pushed to its current geographic whereabouts, and this migratory drift proved a kind of age-long zoological collection journey: as the island drifted, it received a huge variety of life forms through the most diverse channels, including long-disappeared land bridges.

In this connection, the US embargo and its attendant restrictions on travel and tourism, as well as Cuba's relative isolation in the course of years, may be said to have a bright side: spared the stresses of voluminous inflows of tourism, Cuba is today blessed with areas of exuberant nature in a magnificent state of preservation, including almost 850 kilometers of coral reef that are home to nearly 6,500 species of fish, crustaceans, sponges and mollusks and make for ideal scuba-diving spots.

The absence of poisonous animals and large predators in Cuba also makes it ideal for exploration.