1.
Baracoa
–
Baracoa is a municipality and city in Guantánamo Province near the eastern tip of Cuba. It was visited by Admiral Christopher Columbus on November 27,1492, and then founded by the first governor of Cuba and it is the oldest Spanish settlement in Cuba and was its first capital. Baracoa is located on the spot where Christopher Columbus landed in Cuba on his first voyage and it is thought that the name stems from the indigenous Arauaca language word meaning the presence of the sea. Baracoa lies on the Bay of Honey and is surrounded by a mountain range. The original inhabitants of the island were Taíno and they were eradicated by European diseases throughout the island. A local hero is Hatuey, who fled from the Spanish in Hispaniola, according to the story Hatuey was betrayed by a member of his group and sentenced to burn at the stake. It is said that just before he died a Catholic priest tried to convert him so he would attain salvation, when he received an answer in the affirmative he told the priest that he would rather go to Hell. Christopher Columbus landed in Cuba in a place he named Porto Santo and it is generally assumed from his description that this was Baracoa, although there are also claims it was Gibara. But Columbus also described a table mountain, which is almost certainly nearby El Yunque. He wrote in his logbook the most beautiful place in the world. I heard the birds sing that they will never leave this place. According to tradition, Columbus put a cross called Cruz de la Parra in the sands of what would later become Baracoa harbor, in 1518 it received the title of city and the first Cuban bishop was appointed here. As a result, several remains of the Spanish occupation can still be here, such as the fortifications El Castillo, Matachín and La Punta. In the 16th and 17th centuries the isolated location made it a haven for illegal trade with the French, at the beginning of the 19th century many French fled here from the revolution of independence in Haiti, who started growing coffee and cocoa. From the middle of the 19th century many expeditions of independence fighters landed here which helped the independence from Spain in 1902. The road had already planned by the Batista government. The highest point of the road is at over 600 m, the main products in the region are banana, coconut and cacao. It is Cubas main chocolate manufacturing area, the remote location at the eastern end of the Cuban island has kept the influence of mass tourism quite low, despite the idyllic location. Baracoa can be reached by bus from Santiago de Cuba or by plane from Havana, to the east the Fuerte Matachín is still standing and contains houses and museums
2.
Tamarind
–
Tamarind is a leguminous tree in the family Fabaceae indigenous to tropical Africa. The genus Tamarindus is a taxon, having only a single species. The tamarind tree produces edible, pod-like fruit which is used extensively in cuisines around the world, other uses include traditional medicine and metal polish. The wood can be used for woodworking, because of the tamarinds many uses, cultivation has spread around the world in tropical and subtropical zones. It grows wild in Africa in locales as diverse as Sudan, Cameroon, Nigeria, in Arabia, it is found growing wild in Oman, especially Dhofar, where it grows on the sea-facing slopes of mountains. It reached South Asia likely through human transportation and cultivation several years prior to the Common Era. It is widely distributed throughout the belt, from Africa to South Asia, northern Australia. Today, India is the largest producer of tamarind, the consumption of tamarind is widespread due to its central role in the cuisines of the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia and the Americas, particularly Mexico. The tamarind is a long-lived, medium-growth shrub, which attains a maximum height of 12 to 18 metres. The crown has an irregular, vase-shaped outline of dense foliage, the tree grows well in full sun in clay, loam, sandy, and acidic soil types, with a high resistance to drought and aerosol salt. The evergreen leaves are arranged and pinnately compound. The leaflets are green, elliptical ovular, pinnately veined. The branches droop from a single, central trunk as the tree matures and is often pruned in agriculture to optimize tree density, at night, the leaflets close up. The tamarind does flower, though inconspicuously, with red and yellow elongated flowers, flowers are 2.5 cm wide, five-petalled, borne in small racemes, and yellow with orange or red streaks. Buds are pink as the four sepals are pink and are lost when the flower blooms, the fruit is an indehiscent legume, sometimes called a pod,12 to 15 cm in length, with a hard, brown shell. The fruit has a fleshy, juicy, acidulous pulp and it is mature when the flesh is coloured brown or reddish brown. The tamarinds of Asia have longer pods containing six to 12 seeds, whereas African, the seeds are somewhat flattened, and glossy brown. The tamarind is best described as sweet and sour in taste, and is high in acid, sugar, B vitamins
3.
Island
–
An island or isle is any piece of sub-continental land that is surrounded by water. Very small islands such as emergent land features on atolls can be called islets, skerries, an island in a river or a lake island may be called an eyot or ait, and a small island off the coast may be called a holm. A grouping of geographically or geologically related islands is called an archipelago, an island may be described as such, despite the presence of an artificial land bridge. Example, Singapore and its causeway, or the various Dutch delta islands, there are two main types of islands in the sea, continental and oceanic. The word island derives from Middle English iland, from Old English igland, Old English ieg is actually a cognate of Swedish ö and German Aue, and related to Latin aqua. There is a difference between islands and continents in terms of geology, continents sit on continental lithosphere which is part of tectonic plates floating high on Earths mantle. Oceanic crust is also part of tectonic plates, but it is denser than continental lithosphere, Islands are either extensions of the oceanic crust or geologically they are part of some continent sitting on continental lithosphere. This holds true for Australia, which sits on its own continental lithosphere, continental islands are bodies of land that lie on the continental shelf of a continent. A special type of island is the microcontinental island, which is created when a continent is rifted. Examples are Madagascar and Socotra off Africa, the Kerguelen Islands, New Caledonia, New Zealand, another subtype is an island or bar formed by deposition of tiny rocks where water current loses some of its carrying capacity. While some are transitory and may disappear if the volume or speed of the current changes, others are stable, oceanic islands are islands that do not sit on continental shelves. The vast majority are volcanic in origin, such as Saint Helena in the South Atlantic Ocean, the few oceanic islands that are not volcanic are tectonic in origin and arise where plate movements have lifted up the ocean floor above the surface. Examples are Saint Peter and Paul Rocks in the Atlantic Ocean, one type of volcanic oceanic island is found in a volcanic island arc. These islands arise from volcanoes where the subduction of one plate under another is occurring, examples are the Aleutian Islands, the Mariana Islands, and most of Tonga in the Pacific Ocean. The only examples in the Atlantic Ocean are some of the Lesser Antilles, another type of volcanic oceanic island occurs where an oceanic rift reaches the surface. There are two examples, Iceland, which is the second largest volcanic island, and Jan Mayen. A third type of oceanic island is formed over volcanic hotspots. A hotspot is more or less stationary relative to the tectonic plate above it
4.
Hispaniola
–
Hispaniola is the 22nd-largest island in the world, located in the Caribbean island group, the Greater Antilles. It is the second largest island in the Caribbean after Cuba, two sovereign nations share the 76, 192-square-kilometre island. The only other shared island in the Caribbean is Saint Martin, Hispaniola is the site of the first permanent European settlement in the Americas, founded by Christopher Columbus on his voyages in 1492 and 1493. The island was called by various names by its native people, fernández de Oviedo and de las Casas both recorded that the island was called Haiti by the Taíno. DAnghiera added another name, Quizqueia, but later shows that the word does not seem to derive from the original Arawak Taíno language. When Columbus took possession of the island in 1492, he named it Insula Hispana, meaning the Spanish Island in Latin and La Isla Española, meaning the Spanish Island, in Spanish. De las Casas shortened the name to Española, and when d‘Anghiera detailed his account of the island in Latin, he rendered its name as Hispaniola. Due to Taíno, Spanish and French influences on the island, historically the whole island was referred to as Haiti, Hayti, Santo Domingo, St. Domingue. The name Haïti was adopted by Haitian revolutionary Jean-Jacques Dessalines in 1804, as the name of independent Saint-Domingue. It was also adopted as the name of independent Santo Domingo, as the Republic of Spanish Haiti. Christopher Columbus inadvertently landed on the island during his first voyage across the Atlantic in 1492, where his flagship, a contingent of men were left at an outpost christened La Navidad, on the north coast of present-day Haiti. The island was inhabited by the Taíno, one of the indigenous Arawak peoples, the Taino were at first tolerant of Columbus and his crew, and helped him to construct La Navidad on what is now Môle-Saint-Nicolas, Haiti, in December 1492. European colonization of the began in earnest the following year. In 1496 the town of Nueva Isabela was founded, after being destroyed by a hurricane, it was rebuilt on the opposite side of the Ozama River and called Santo Domingo. It is the oldest permanent European settlement in the Americas, several 16th century writers estimated the 1492 population of Hispaniola at over 1 million people. Twentieth-century estimates of the range from 60,000 to 8,000,000. Harsh enslavement by Spanish colonists, redirection of food supplies and labor towards the colonists, had a impact on both mortality and fertility over the first quarter century. Colonial administrators and Dominican and Hyeronimite priests observed that the search for gold, demographic data from two provinces in 1514 shows a low birth rate consistent with a 3. 5% annual population decline
5.
Spaniards
–
Within Spain there are a number of nationalisms and regionalisms, reflecting the countrys complex history and diverse culture. There are several commonly spoken languages, most notably Basque. There are many populations outside Spain with ancestors who emigrated from Spain, the Roman Republic conquered Iberia during the 2nd and 1st centuries BC. As a result of Roman colonization, the majority of languages, with the exception of Basque. The Germanic Vandals and Suebi, with part of the Iranian Alans under King Respendial conquered the peninsula in 409 AD. The Iberian Peninsula was conquered and brought under the rule of the Arab Umayyads in 711 and by the Berber North African dynasties the Almohads, in the early 16th century the Kingdom of Navarre was also conquered. In parallel, a wave of emigration began to the Americas began with over 16 million people emigrating to the Americas during the colonial period. In the post-colonial period, a further 3.5 million Spanish left for the Americas, particularly Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, as a result, Spanish-descendants in Latin America number in the hundreds of millions. Spain is home to one of the largest communities of Romani people, the Spanish Roma, which belong to the Iberian Kale subgroup, are a formerly-nomadic community, which spread across Western Asia, North Africa, and Europe, first reaching Spain in the 15th century. The population of Spain is became increasingly diverse due to recent immigration, the earliest modern humans inhabiting Spain are believed to have been Neolithic peoples who may have arrived in the Iberian Peninsula as early as 35, 000–40,000 years ago. In more recent times the Iberians are believed to have arrived or developed in the region between the 4th millennium BC and the 3rd millennium BC, initially settling along the Mediterranean coast, celts settled in Spain during the Iron Age. Some of those tribes in North-central Spain, which had contact with the Iberians, are called Celtiberians. In addition, a known as the Tartessians and later Turdetanians inhabited southwestern Spain. The seafaring Phoenicians, Greeks, and Carthaginians successively founded trading colonies along the Mediterranean coast over a period of several centuries, the Second Punic War between the Carthaginians and Romans was fought mainly in what is now Spain and Portugal. The Roman Republic conquered Iberia during the 2nd and 1st centuries BC transformed most of the region into a series of Latin-speaking provinces, hispania emerged as an important part of the Roman Empire and produced notable historical figures such as Trajan, Hadrian, Seneca and Quintilian. The Germanic Vandals and Suebi, with part of the Iranian Alans under King Respendial, the Suebi became the first Germanic kingdom to convert officially to Roman Catholicism in 447 AD. under king Rechiar. After two centuries of domination by the Visigothic Kingdom, the Iberian Peninsula was invaded by a Muslim force under Tariq Bin Ziyad in 711 and this army consisted mainly ethnic Berbers from the Ghomara tribe, which were reinforced by Arabs from Syria once the conquest was complete. Muslim Iberia became part of the Umayyad Caliphate and would be known as Al-Andalus, the Berbers of Al Andalus revolted as early as 740 AD, halting Arab expansion across the Pyrenees into France
"