In April 1961 a brigade of CIA-trained Cuban exiles landed on this beach and at Playa Larga further up the bay. Within seventy-two hours the invasion had collapsed, and the episode did more than anything else to set the shape of the next sixty years — pushing Cuba decisively towards the Soviet Union and leading to the missile crisis eighteen months later. The Museo Girón in the village tells it from the Cuban side, with wreckage, photographs and a Sea Fury in the yard, and roadside billboards still mark where each unit fell.
What brings most visitors now is the water. The coast drops into a wall a short swim from shore, which makes this some of the best and cheapest shore diving in the Caribbean: you walk in at Punta Perdiz or Caleta Buena and you are on the reef within minutes, no boat needed. Visibility is reliably good, and inland there are cenotes — flooded sinkholes in the limestone — for divers with the right training.
The Zapata swamp behind the coast is the largest wetland in the Caribbean and the best birding in Cuba. The bee hummingbird, the smallest bird in the world, lives here, along with the Zapata wren and the Cuban trogon.
It is a quiet strip of village and cabins rather than a resort, and it stays that way largely because the road in is long.