Visited in February 2023.

Like Havana, Santiago de Cuba is built on a bay that goes deep enough into the land. Like in Havana, the fairly narrow entrance to this bay was easily protected by fortification systems. The Spaniards spared them no money. The island was a transshipment base for armadas of galleons loaded with precious metals from the New World, and pirates in the 17th and 18th centuries began to attack cities with the aim of extracting booty from them.
The fortress on the rocky promontory of El Morro, 10 km from Santiago (easy taxi ride), began to be built in 1638 under the leadership of the Milanese engineer Giovanni Battista Antonelli, and it was done intermittently until the end of the century (and then expanded further). As a result, a powerful four-level fortification came out, descending in tiers from the top of the cape to the surface of the water.
When the pirates got out, the fort was used as a prison, and then it was completely abandoned. But in the 1960s it was restored quite carefully and is considered the largest and best preserved example of Spanish-Italian Renaissance bastion fortifications in the Americas. The most pleasant impression is the opportunity to observe the harbor from the fortifications, and then you understand the idea of ​​the creators of the fortress.