Matanzas

The city of Matanzas, home to 163,631 inhabitants within an expanse of 317 square kilometres, rests upon the northern shore of Cuba, nestled along the deep inlet of the Bay of Matanzas. It occupies a point precisely 102 kilometres east of Havana and 32 kilometres west of the renowned resort enclave of Varadero. A web of three rivers—Yumurí, San Juan and Canímar—threads through its urban fabric, spanned by seventeen bridges that have earned the municipality its sobriquet “City of Bridges” (Ciudad de los Puentes). Here the rhythms of Afro-Cuban folklore and the echoes of nineteenth-century sugar fortunes coexist under a subtropical sky. This nexus of geography and history constitutes the essence of Matanzas’s identity.

At its inception on 12 October 1693, the settlement bore the name San Carlos y San Severino de Matanzas, the fruit of a royal cédula issued on 25 September 1690 mandating the settlement of thirty Canary Island families upon the bay and port. Those early colonists carved out modest homesteads along salty shores, their wooden dwellings and pastel façades yielding in time to more enduring masonry as the settlement slowly coalesced into a town. A modest grid laid out around the shoreline encouraged commerce in agricultural produce and fish hauled in by small skiffs. Within a few decades the port’s strategic position, sheltered by the bay’s concave arms, attracted a growing transatlantic traffic of goods and ideas. By the mid-eighteenth century Matanzas had begun to assume a character both mercantile and cultural.

Sugar emerged as the region’s principal engine of wealth during the colonial era, its gleaming crystals destined for European markets and the ever-hungry mills of England. Planters established vast plantations in the fertile valley of the Yumurí and along the coastal plain, drawing on the labour of African captives transported across the Atlantic. In 1792, nearly 1,900 slaves—around thirty percent of the local population—tended cane fields and boiling houses. By 1817 that number had risen to 10,773, representing almost half of all residents; by 1841 enslaved people comprised 62.7 percent of Matanzas’s populace, a figure that would swell to 104,519 by 1859. Such reliance on forced labour precipitated multiple insurrections and conspiracies—most infamously the Escalera conspiracy exposed in late 1843—fractures that revealed both the plantation economy’s cruelty and the unquenchable desire for freedom among those it sought to bind.

Although the lash and the plantation moulded much of Matanzas’s colonial history, the very density of its African-derived population enabled the survival and flowering of distinct cultural traditions. In defiance of enforced dispersal, Yoruba-based rituals persisted under new guises, nurturing Santería and other syncretic faiths. The resonant beat of rumba drums and the stately cadence of the danzón first took their modern shape here. In the marketplace or the town square, dancers and musicians wove complex rhythms that spoke of displacement and resilience; the music became an aural map of ancestral memory. By the late nineteenth century, Matanzas had earned praise as “La Atenas de Cuba,” the Athens of Cuba, a tribute to its poets and intellectual circles whose salons rivalled those of Havana.

The physical contours of Matanzas contribute as much to its character as its social tapestry. The bay cuts deeply into the island’s northern flank, enfolding the city on three sides; the Rio Yumurí, coursing from the southeast, bisects a valley that rises to the conical hill called Pan de Matanzas. A coastal ridge separates that valley from the Atlantic’s brine-spooled beaches, while the San Juan and Canímar rivers join the bay to the west and east respectively. Seventeen bridges arch across these waterways, invoking comparisons to Venice—an epithet often affixed to Matanzas—yet the Cuban currents and heat lend the scene a tropical vivacity unmatched by any European analogue.

The municipality unfolds into four principal neighborhoods—Versalles, Matanzas proper, Playa and Pueblo Nuevo—each divided further into barrios bearing names such as Bachicha, Bailén, Bellamar, Colón and San Severino, among others. This mosaic of districts reflects the city’s layered growth: the colonial core, the nineteenth-century sugar quarters, the twentieth-century suburban expansions and newer residential zones. In Versalles stands the separate station of the famed Hershey electric railway, a remnant of early twentieth-century corporate enterprise that once ferried sugar from plantations to Havana. The main railway station, by contrast, links Matanzas to the national line stretching from Havana through Santiago de Cuba.

Airborne travellers alight at Juan Gualberto Gómez Airport, positioned fifteen kilometres east of the city, before boarding buses or taxis for the brief transit westward. Within urban limits, Viazul and Astro coaches serve regional routes, while a network of taxis and local buses threads through the barrios. Tramcars once rumbled along these streets, introduced in 1916 as the Ferrocarril Eléctrico de Matanzas and later run by municipal and private entities until replaced by motor buses in 1954. Roadways now centre upon the Via Blanca highway, which carries travellers west toward Havana and east toward the sands of Varadero, where many visitors first glimpse Cuba’s northern coast.

At 520 inhabitants per square kilometre, Matanzas possesses a moderate density that balances urban conveniences with pockets of green: shaded plazas, palm-lined boulevards and the open fields near the rivers’ mouths. The city’s 2022 census population of 163,631 attests to modest growth, a pace tempered by economic shifts and migration patterns throughout the island. Within this framework, cultural institutions persist: the Coliseo de Bellas Artes hosts concerts and exhibitions, while libraries and academic societies maintain the city’s literary reputation. Echoes of past affluence linger in neoclassical facades and baroque details, their weathered stucco surfaces bearing witness to centuries of sun and sea breeze.

The layered narratives of Matanzas converged dramatically at the dawn of the twentieth century, when the Spanish–American War ignited upon its bay. On 25 April 1898, mere hours after hostilities commenced, American naval vessels shelled the city’s fortifications and port installations, signifying the first action of the conflict on Cuban soil. Plumes of smoke rose above low-lying batteries as shells exploded against masonry ramparts, inaugurating a brief but decisive engagement that presaged Spain’s withdrawal from the hemisphere. In the months that followed, the war’s outcome irreversibly altered Cuba’s political trajectory; yet in Matanzas the memory of that bombardment endures as part of a broader tapestry of colonial resistance and transformation.

Throughout the twentieth century, waves of modernization and revolution reshaped the lives of Matanceros. The Hershey railway—named for the American chocolate magnate Milton S. Hershey, who invested in Cuban sugar interests—continued to operate its single-track electric line until the closing decades, symbolizing both foreign influence and local endurance. Television antennas sprouted atop colonial rooftops, radio stations broadcast news and boleros, and educational institutions expanded opportunities for new generations. Poets continued to write of the city’s pale sunrise over the bay; dancers refined the danzón steps that had delighted aristocratic audiences since the 1870s.

Yet the soul of Matanzas remains profoundly tied to its Afro-Cuban heritage. In the dimly lit casas de rumba and the open plazas, drummers and singers convene for ceremonies that blend diction from Lucumí (the liturgical tongue of Santería) with Spanish verse. Offerings of fruit and candles to deities such as Ochún or Changó evoke ancient lineages, while ritual songs preserve genealogies of family and faith. This living tradition is inseparable from the city’s sense of self; it resonates in every plaza, in every bridge-spanned canal, a testament to endurance beyond forced removal and plantation confines.

The city also claims the birthright of Danza and Rumba, the musics that shaped Cuban cultural identity. Danza, with its refined European contours and African syncopation, emerged among Matanzas’s salons before migrating to Havana’s grand saloons. Rumba, in contrast, embodied the unrestrained vitality of street gatherings and rural festivities, laying the groundwork for salsa and other modern Afro-Cuban expressions. Decades later, in nearby Havana, Dámaso Pérez Prado—originating in Matanzas—would usher in the mambo craze, his big-band arrangements spreading across dance floors in Mexico City, New York and beyond.

Today’s visitor to Matanzas finds a city that invites both contemplation and immersion. Some arrive from Varadero’s beaches, curious to glimpse an authentic Cuban town beyond the resort gates. Others come drawn by the prospect of Santería ceremonies or rumba afternoons in Barrio Simpson. A handful pursue architectural photography, seeking the curve of an iron-wrought balcony or the peeling pastel of a colonial mansion. Still others traverse the seventeen bridges at dawn, watching fishermen cast lines into quiet river eddies framed by mangroves. In each instance the city reciprocates, offering memories of subtropical light, the pulse of conga drums and the soft rustle of river currents against time-worn stone.

Matanzas’s appeal endures not merely because of its neoclassical theatres, its storied railways or its aptly named “Venice of Cuba” bridges, but because it embodies a confluence: of continents, cultures and epochs. From the first Canary Island families to the enslaved peoples of Africa, from colonial sugar barons to revolutionary poets, from Spanish cannonballs to contemporary musicians, the city’s narrative is one of flux and fidelity. Here the present moment is inseparable from the past and yet not subsumed by it; each sunrise over the Bay of Matanzas bears witness to centuries of commerce, creativity and courage, awaiting those who wish to listen to its intricate hymn.