There is a Cuban archipelago that has borne a name of Spanish royalty for almost five centuries: the Jardines del Rey. And there is a cay within it, small and with very high dunes, that a millionaire fisherman and Nobel laureate turned into the setting of one of his novels. That cay is Cayo Guillermo, and its history mixes conquistadors, corsairs, Ernest Hemingway and one of the fastest tourist transformations in the Caribbean. Cayo Guillermo forms part of the Jardines del Rey archipelago, an extensive group of cays and islets that fringe the north-central coast of Cuba, within the great Sabana-Camagüey island system. The archipelago's name dates back to the early 16th century: according to tradition, it was the conquistador Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar who named these islands 'Jardines del Rey' (King's Gardens) in honor of King Ferdinand the Catholic, monarch of Spain at the time of the conquest of Cuba.
The name evokes the almost paradisiacal beauty of these cays: transparent waters, white sand, mangroves, coral reefs and abundant marine and bird life. For centuries, however, that beauty remained practically intact and uninhabited, since the cays were hard to reach and lacked fresh water and conditions for stable settlement.
Cayo Guillermo, a small cay located west of Cayo Coco, shares that natural history. Its setting of dunes —among the highest in the Caribbean—, unspoiled beaches and sandy shallows made it, long before tourism, a refuge for wildlife and a landmark for the navigators who traveled the maze of islands of northern Cuba.
For most of its history, Cayo Guillermo and the other cays of the Jardines del Rey remained unpopulated or inhabited only seasonally. Without fresh water sources or farmland, they were not suited to permanent settlement, but they were frequented by fishermen who took advantage of the richness of their waters, by hawksbill turtle gatherers and by the huge colonies of sea and aquatic birds, including the pink flamingos that still populate the area today.
The maze of cays, mangroves and channels of northern Cuba also had, like much of the Caribbean, its era of pirates, corsairs and smugglers. These islands offered natural hideouts and discreet routes for the illegal trade that dodged the Spanish monopoly, as well as temporary refuge for vessels. That aura of isolation and adventure was part of the identity of the Jardines del Rey for centuries.
Thus, while the colonial towns of Cuba's interior grew and prospered, the northern cays remained a wild, little-traveled territory, a world apart of dunes, beaches and mangroves that only much later, in the 20th century, would begin to draw attention for very different reasons: first literary and, finally, touristic.
Cayo Guillermo's international fame was born thanks to literature. The American writer Ernest Hemingway, a resident of Cuba for many years, was a passionate sailor and fisherman who traveled the waters of northern Cuba aboard his famous yacht, the 'Pilar', during the 1930s and 1940s. These cays, with their sandy shallows, their reefs and their abundant fishing, were one of his favorite settings.
Hemingway turned these waters into literature. In his posthumous novel 'Islands in the Stream', published in 1970, the cays of northern Cuba —Cayo Guillermo among them— appear as the setting of the action, conveying the beauty and solitude of these marine spots. The cay's connection with the writer became so ingrained that the most famous beach in the place, Playa Pilar, bears precisely the name of his yacht.
In this way, long before the first hotel was built, Cayo Guillermo already had a place in the international imagination thanks to Hemingway. That literary aura remains today one of the great attractions of the destination and forms part of the tourist narrative that accompanies its beaches: the visitor sails, in a way, the same waters that inspired one of the great writers of the 20th century.
The great change in Cayo Guillermo's history came at the end of the 20th century, when Cuba bet on developing sun-and-beach tourism in the Jardines del Rey as one of its main sources of foreign currency. To make the cays, until then isolated, accessible, a long causeway was built: a road raised over the sea that crosses the Bahía de Perros and links the cays (Cayo Coco and Cayo Guillermo) with the mainland, in Ciego de Ávila province.
With access solved, large all-inclusive resorts were raised in front of the beaches, fitted with hotels, pools, water-sports and dive centers, and an airport was developed on Cayo Coco (Jardines del Rey, CCC) to receive international charter flights. Cayo Guillermo and Cayo Coco thus became, in a few decades, one of the most important beach tourist hubs in Cuba, with the famous Playa Pilar as its great emblem.
This development, however, was not without controversy. The construction of the causeway altered the natural circulation of water in the bay and raised concern about its impact on the fragile ecosystems of mangroves, coral reefs and birds of the area. The tension between tourist exploitation and the conservation of these environments —part of a reserve of great ecological value— remains a present issue. Today, Cayo Guillermo combines its status as a first-rate beach destination with the challenge of preserving the nature that, along with the Hemingway legend, made it famous. The region's history is completed by that of neighboring Cayo Coco and Ciego de Ávila province.