For those who love larger-than-life and fantasized love stories, there's one for the books at La Isabelica. History and flights of the imagination meet in this gorgeous landscape of the eastern province of Santiago de Cuba. This is a story that rekindles pride for the blending of different cultures: Spanish, African, Haitian, French and Asian.

The story goes that Frenchman Victor Constantin, the estate owner, never had a wife or any white woman as a companion. However, a slave of his named Isabel Maria used to fill every nook and cranny around that house near La Gran Piedra.

At La Isabelica, we can turn back time to 200 years ago and live the place's loving and noble grandeur all over again. The surrounding coffee plantations and grain dryers witnessed the sweat in slaves' brows and the desire for freedom in a population that was virtually weeded out of its traditions and creeds.

A love story This love yarn began to be spun when from neighboring Haiti, in the middle of the Slave Revolution, came masters, maidens and cultures that settled down over 1,200 meters above sea level atop La Gran Piedra, now a world-class tourist center that lies near the city of Santiago de Cuba.

Huge coffee plantations sprung up there during the 18th and 19th centuries, yet the most visible footprint was left by La Isabelica farm estate. The owner named it after his favorite slave, Isabel Maria.

The hushed sauntering of Isabel Maria can still be overheard around the premises of La Isabelica, turned into a museum back in 1976 and whose many details take us in an imaginary trip to the way of life of French settler Victor Constantin.

The spacious mansion has two stories. The lower floor is dominated by the carpentry and the warehouse, filled with axes, machetes, dregs of glassware, shackles and other tools and means that marked that particular time. The warehouse was used as a barnyard and showcases the remnants of an old-timed coffee grain rolling pin and five dryers shaped in the form of terraces, plus a mill used at the time to ret the dried grains of coffee.

The upper floor still features the original bell that was tolled to call slaves to the exhausting work or back to their short-lived rest. As witnesses of a splendorous time now long gone, the house still preserves the living room, the dining room, the studio, the library and the master bedroom that treasures the memories of so heart-throbbing a love story.

In an effort to keep the noble environment around the house intact, a few objects were rescued from nearby coffee plantations and farms, like an older-than-the-hills piano, the French coat of arms used at the time, Medallion-style furniture and chinaware.

The portray of Victor Contantin welcomes visitors in the main room of the old-timed mansion. With his image, fantasy and imagination pop up everywhere as silent onlookers of that secret love kept down deep inside by Isabel Maria, one of the maidens that did chores around the house and brought so many nights of love and passion to his French master. Suffice it say that such romancing was strictly forbidden during the colonial rule.

The story goes on that Isabel Maria was pretty aware of his master's tiniest details and tastes. She was never freed despite being officially married to his master. She died a slave, despite being the master of that huge farm estate.

Many travelers get to La Isabelica each year, some of them flummoxed by the legend and the attractiveness of the place. This is a site of eastern Cuba that seems to revive the enlightened past of a culture that got tangled up in the insular geography of the island nation and gave rise to new ways of living and doing.

Remainders of a colonial past La Isabelica lays bares the traces of a colonial culture. The surroundings still feature the same coffee plantations and trails that were traipsed up and down by waves of French masters and African slaves.

The ruins of dozens of French-Haitian coffee farm estates that dotted the entire region in the late 18th century and the early 19th century, now add a new look to Santiago de Cuba. Two of the best-known settlements there were Santa Sofia and Kentucky.

But out of that magnificent pack La Isabelica keeps its footprint very much fresh nowadays. And as time-proof reminders of that glorious past, the ruins of that former coffee empire that played a major role in the economic development of the colonial-ruled island at the time, still stand tall for everyone to see.

The La Isabelica Museum, declared Heritage of Mankind by UNESCO in the year 2000, cherishes both highly historical values and a cultural fortune conveyed in the prosperity of some artistic manifestations as dancing, music, religion, literature and cuisine from the eastern side of the country, expressions that spilled way beyond the insular boundaries and reached out to other Caribbean islands.