Salto Fino waterfall

Salto Fino waterfall is the highest waterfall in the Caribbean, located in Cuba's north-eastern municipality of Guantanamo, is produced by a sudden drop in the Arroyo del Infierno (Hell's stream), a tributary of the Quibijan River. That river, along with 71 others, flows into the Toa, which is the largest river in Cuba. The 305-meter-high Salto Fino waterfall is recorded as the 20th highest water chute in the world.

In 1966, Dr. Núñez Jiménez current President of the Speleological Society of Cuba took from a helicopter that flew over the area, several pictures with vertical views of Salto Fino waterfall in the Stream of the Hell.

In 1996, with the leadership of Dr. Núñez Jiménez, members of the Foundation “The Nature and The Man”, the Society Speleological of Cuba, the Institute of Geography, the Museum of Natural History and the Ministry of the Armed Forces, carried out two expeditions in search of Salto Fino waterfall, to which they never reach by land way.

The objective was to reach key points of the abrupt geography of the Knives of the Toa “Cuchillas del Toa” for that which they overcome the Toa and its tributaries in cayucas and they also advance for its margins in truck or in mules.

They had this way the luck to contemplate and to study the area of the Tibaracón of the Toa, The Thunder, The “Saltadero” of the Toa and the one that more pride offered for the difficult thing that it was its access: Salto Fino waterfall in the Stream of the Hell.

Salto Fino waterfall it is found in the Stream The Hell, located in the Ecological Reservation Quibijan –Duaba -Yunque of Baracoa, County of Guantánamo, and it is located in the coordinates 184 300 N-727 800E.

This jump of water, with their 305 m of fall (record reported for Cuba and the Insular Caribbean) it is not totally in the vertical one, because this made up of several jumps with slopes between 75 and 90 degrees, the one bigger has 40 meters of vertical fall.

According to the inhabitants' of the area information, some of which spend of 40 years in those places, Stream The Hell has permanent character. This is due to an underground feeding for springs that drain to expense of the reservations of the waters stored in the underground net of collector-drivers that works like levels of waters hung fundamentally among barrier layers whose litology is compound by rocks.

Salto Fino has a total journey of 3 kilometers, of which 90% corresponds to its later development to the main jump, and it possesses a small watershed of superficial and underground feeding of 3 square kilometers.

The water throws approximately from the bench mark of 600 meters, and falls until the bench mark of 295 meters with a total difference of 305 meters. Salto Fino waterfall has eight cascades between 75º and 90º, the bigger than which it reaches 60 meters in the vertical one.

Starting from here you dilute below, they take place twenty serial jumps of water that vary between 15 and 5 meters of difference, with slopes in the range of 85-90º, that finish hardly to 150 meters of the fork with the river Quibiján, which constitutes the level of local base, reaching 540 meters the total difference of the studied system of cascades of Stream The Hell.