Prints of the XVII century in Camagüey

It is a disclosed reality so little that walks hidden for most of people, and one of the passages hardly marks well-known or unpublished of Santa María del Puerto del Príncipe.

It has, maybe, the appearance of a speculation: emigrated of a wide origin diversity lived in the XVII century in the today city of Camagüey.

Ecclesiastical documents and of clerkships of the time testify that the population of the village didn't only integrate , as for the foreign origin, originating of Spain and África.

The rest of the strange presence came from places like Ireland, Rome, Genoa, Venice, Sicily, Great Britain, Germany, France, Holland, Portugal, Venezuela, Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Guatemala, Jamaica, Puerto Rico and Santo Domingo.

Of the emigration in that century were in yellowish folios names as Domingo Antonio of Aritona, Bartolomé of Xaynes Sunnia, Manuel of Coffin, Juana of Silva Copengier, Martin of Estert, Manuel of Roha, Juan de Li Coé, Antonio González de Figueroa, Lope Rodríguez of Ximénez and the Indian Francisco Carrión.

It was singular that multinational fork in a stage in which the village had, for example in 1689, hardly two thousand 739 inhabitants, and distabed a lot the beginning of its consolidation stage, begun in 1800 according to experts in the topic.

To it sinks the permanency of the establishment, from 1528, in its definitive location in the center of an enormous savanna, that which condemned her to a supposed isolation.

Sacred María del Puerto del Príncipe had lost its primitive coastal location and the difficulties of its contacts increased with the exterior, in one period in which the marine road was the main communication road in the Island.

So many setbacks didn't impede the migratory currents from so many dissimilar points to a town where in a majority way Spaniards resided, a population's African and Creole, as well as Indian survivors decimated by the conquest and the colonization.

How many of those no belonging to the migratory flows more nurtured in the XVII century to the village died there? How did they influence in the thought, in the customs and in other facets of the local life? Which descending its still reside in Camagüey?

Those are alone some of the questions whose answers, even in the most complete cases, have notorious cracks in the history of one of the oldest human establishments been founded by Spain in the New World.

They are, also, one of the so many enigmas that have arrived to our days with more than 300 years of existence, and continue withit veil spread in one of the less well-known centuries of Santa María del Puerto del Príncipe. ( Adolfo Silva Silva, AIN)