Camagüey Geography
Province located to the eastern end of the central region of Cuba. It has an extension of 15 584,72 sq km (6017 sq mi) and an estimated population of 771 931 inhabitants (1996). The province ranks first in extension and sixth in population.
In this province, plains predominate, but not all the land is plain in the Camagüey territory. The Sierra de Cubitas is notable because of its caves, considered the biggest and most beautiful of the island. One of them, located in the Tuabaquey hill (highest elevation of the province) and having an additional historical and cultural value, is preserved as testimony of a past runaway slave refuge.
From the high and abrupt slopes, with carsic characteristics like coastal rocks, one can see the impressively deep creeks. River Máximo, after passing through the mountains between the Tuabaquey and Santa Cruz heights, forms to the north beautiful natural water holes displaying attractive white marbles.
The existence of igneous and metamorphic rocks near the city of Camagüey has propitiated the formation of chromite, a strategic mineral, in such quantities that it could become the most important Cuban ore deposit.
Camagüey’s coralline northern coast allows to work out, lightly over the sea level, the hundreds of keys and islets of the Jardines del Rey archipelago. The islet known as Cayo Romano displays hills of relative importance like La Silla, which presence means that the origin of the islet was not merely the growing of the coral reef, but geological folds of the limestone crust of the region.
To the north of the Esmeralda municipality there have been discoveries of ammonite fossils from the Mesozoic Age.
