Desembarco del Granma

Declared in 1980 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1999, the park is named after the yacht Granma, aboard which Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and 80 other revolutionaries landed clandestinely on this coast on 2 December 1956 to begin the guerrilla campaign against Fulgencio Batista's regime — a founding episode of the Cuban Revolution that gives its name to both the park and the surrounding province. Beyond its historical significance, the park is scientifically valued for containing one of the best-preserved sequences of stepped marine terraces in the world, formed by successive tectonic uplifts combined with changes in sea level over hundreds of thousands of years, which allow the recent geological history of the Caribbean to be read with exceptional clarity.