There is a city in Cuba with exceptional stylistic values of French origins, noticeable in the wide and straight layout of its streets as much as in the pastel-colored facades and the majestic mansions with tall columns.
It is the seaside city of Cienfuegos, a.k.a. the Pearl of the South but also distinguished by a perhaps more anonymous epithet: the city of domes.
Some twenty buildings boast that architectural element, typical of a period of opulence from the late 19th century to the beginning of the 20th. Twelve of them are in the Historic Urban Center, declared by UNESCO Cultural Heritage of Humanity on July 15, 2005.
Around the central José Martí Park, several domes greet national and foreign visitors from the heights, mainly the two ones of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception. The taller one (42 meters) was designed by the American civil engineer Santiago Murria.
Sugarcane growers and merchants contributed to the urban development of the former Fernandina de Jagua colony by commissioning residences of different styles and marked by domes that have survived to the present day and were very popular between the 1880s and 1920s.
Some of these mansions bear the name of their wealthy owners, for example, the house-warehouse of José de García de la Noceda (1881), a neoclassical work, with its wooden arch covered with a metallic layer crowning the third level. There is also the Ferrer Palace (1918), today the Museum of Arts, designed by the local Pablo Donato Carbonell and topped by an elegant turret that allows visitors to enjoy the urban image of a town that brings together the old and the modern.
Another Mughal-style overhead vault, made of orange-colored ceramic, adorns the old residence of the Rodriguez Trinidad family, designed by the Italian Alfredo Fontana, built from 1920 to 1921 and now converted into the Palacio Azul Hotel.
There are also the two green-and-white domes that seem to guard the facade of the centennial Cienfuegos Club, formerly Cienfuegos Yacht Club, conceived by the famous Carbonell himself and opened in 1920.
And by the entrance of the bay, in the Fortress of Our Lady of the Angels of Jagua—the only one located in central Cuba built in colonial times (1745)—there are three towers finished with quarrying tops.
This city tells us its history through numerous architectural and urban styles and elements, a source of pride for its dwellers, as are the straight streets, the long seafront, and the more than 20 domes that seem to reach out to the skies from this coastal city.