River · Cuba
Cauto River
The Cauto River is the longest river on the island of Cuba. It starts in the Sierra Maestra mountains and flows west into the Gulf of Guacanayabo on the Caribbean Sea.
Picture credit: Not home~commonswiki (Public domain) · Christian Pirkl (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Ambm1969 (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where is the Cauto River?
The river starts here: Sierra Maestra mountains in eastern Cuba.
It ends in the Gulf of Guacanayabo, Caribbean Sea.
Countries on the river: Cuba.
The story behind it
The Cauto crosses a wide, hot plain covered with sugar cane, rice fields and grazing cattle. Long ago small ships sailed a good way upstream, but over the years soil washed down from the cleared hills and filled the bed with sand, so today only shallow boats can pass. The weather here swings between extremes: in the dry season parts of the riverbed shrink to puddles, while a single hurricane can send brown floodwater across whole villages. Near the coast the Cauto ends in a wide delta of mangroves, mudflats and salt lagoons where pink flamingos wade and manatees swim in the warm shallows. Farmers pump water onto their rice fields, fishers cast nets from the banks, and the old city of Bayamo lies not far from its middle course.
Questions children ask
How long is the Cauto River?
The Cauto River is about 343 km long. No other river on the island of Cuba comes close to that length.
Which country does the Cauto River flow through?
The Cauto River flows only through Cuba, in the eastern half of the island. Its valley is one of the country's main farming areas.
Where does the Cauto River flow into the sea?
It flows into the Gulf of Guacanayabo, a bay of the Caribbean Sea. Its mouth is a marshy delta protected as a nature reserve.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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