Several millennia ago, human settlements moved into the mountains of the Rosario Sierra. Those men who used to scour the region belong to a mid stage of Mesolithic development. Based on the assumption of an alleged cyclical inland movement of the coast, these human groups settled down in the mountains for brief periods of time. Their poor livelihood banked absolutely on the surrounding natural conditions. Their natural refuges were caves, rocky shelters and even rustic houses. In there, these first islanders used to wait out wicked weather conditions during springtime and summer, leaving tokens of their stays, bone remains and other evidence of their material culture.

In the mid 16th century, these traveling communities vanished as a result of the European conquest. The piecemeal occupation of their settlement sites, slavery and abuses committed in the name of Christianity took a deadly toll on these populations. In the mid 16th century, European conquistadors started out the permanent occupation of the Vueltabajo lands, building round farms reserved for extensive livestock breeding that eventually put a positive spin on the whole region.

The first of those faros, built in 1568, was called El Cusco. Later on, in 1629, the San Salvador got the green light to open up. Little by little, other properties got in the business: El Rubi, San Blas, San Juan de Contreras and San Jose de Manantiales.

The main objective of these cattle ranches or swine farms was to provide meta to the villages of San Cristobal de La Havana and the use of croplands by those who lived in the vicinity. This economic activity dragged on for a couple of centuries only to languish in the late 18th century.

The revolutionary airs that blew through the French colony of Saint Dominique (Haiti) in 1791, sparked off a migration flow of French settlers to Cuba, who brought along their expertise and experience in both the cultivation and marketing of coffee.

The initial occupation triggered the populating of fluvial valleys around the rivers: Pedernales, San Juan, Bayate, Manantiales, Santiago, San Claudio and San Francisco.

It never occurred to the founders of coffee farms that several decades later they would be forced to abandon them as a result of improper use of soils, soaring prices in the world market and damages caused by ravaging hurricanes. This deadly combination snuffed out their creativeness and hard work.

The advance of coffee cultivation in the Sierra de Rosario, coupled with the sugar harvest in the nearby plains, required an increasingly larger workforce of slaves brought from the faraway African lands. Those determined to skip the harsh working conditions imposed on them and the severe punishments used to run up into the hills and became known as cimarrones or runaway slaves. They were implacably chased and hunted by slavers and their bunches of blood-thirsty rangers with fiery hound dogs in tow.

Some of the most sought-after places by the cimarrones were the hills of El Mulo, Las Peladas, El Taburete, El Cusco and the Naptuno, San Jose, San Luis and San Pedro coffee plantations.

The late 19th century gave way to one of the most outstanding developments of that period: the 1895-1898 Independence War organized by Jose Marti, Cuba's National Hero. During that time, every nook and cranny of those mountains was rattled by the conflict in which Antonio Maceo and his troops were the stars of some of the fiercest and most relevant battles. Places like El Rubi, La Madama and Aranjuez, among others, still bring back memories of those historic moments.

The war brought on a total depopulation of the premises between 1898 and 1958. In the early 1900s, survivors and veterans of the Independence Wars began to repopulate the mountains, mainly the former settlements by the mouths of the Bayate, San Juan and Pedernales rivers.

The masses of peasants that peopled these premises between 1898 and 1959 were forced to resort to the only activities that could help them bring home the bacon. Hunting, coal making and logging were the only livelihood available to them. Woods were felled and damaged for centuries, virtually disappearing from the mountainsides and turning the area into a much depopulated region.