Camagüey Archipelago

Camagüey Archipelago is the eastern stretch of the Sabana-Camagüey chain, a shallow maze of low cays along Cuba's north-central Atlantic shore. The full chain runs from the Hicacos Peninsula to Nuevitas Bay, while the eastern section includes the Jardines del Rey islands such as Coco, Guillermo and Romano. Mangroves, sandbars and narrow channels separate the mainland from the open Atlantic, leaving sheltered water inside the island fringe.

Spanish explorers named the eastern cays Jardines del Rey in 1513. Lacking dependable fresh water, they remained mostly uninhabited, but their passages gave small craft routes through the reef and into the mainland bays. In the sixteenth century the maze sheltered corsairs, including Jacques de Sores, who used the archipelago while raiding Spanish Caribbean settlements. Smuggling and fishing continued where formal ports and roads could not easily reach.

The cays divided the two great Atlantic approaches to northern Cuba: the Nicholas Channel in the west and the Old Bahama Channel farther east. Deep water beyond the reefs made these channels important to ships, while inside them only informed pilots could follow the winding passes. By the 1830s the archipelago remained a thinly settled maritime borderland of mangrove, shallows and scattered anchorages rather than a developed resort coast.