Santa Clara is the last resting place of El Che, Ernesto 'Che' Guevara - there is a large monument, a museum and a mausoleum. It is an interesting and tasteful tribute to him, set away from the town and free from souvenir sellers and suchlike.

Che was killed in Bolivia in 1967 along with many other Cuban guerilla fighters, on a failed mission to initiate a revolution there. They were captured and interrogated there for a day by a combination of Bolivian and American soldiers and officials before being shot. Thirty years later the bones of 17 of the guerillas, including Che, were dug up from where they had been hidden under an airfield in Bolivia and moved to Cuba.

In Cuba at the time they had already built a tall statue of Che on a plinth in a wide open space near Santa Clara so a dark mausoleum was created underneath this statue and the bones were interred there. The mausoleum is decorated in a very modern and tranquil manner, with clay images of the faces of 38 fighters who died in Bolivia alongside an eternal flame.

Also under the statue is a small museum with many photographs of Che's life and a number of artefacts including a chair belonging to his grandmother Lynch (the Irish side of the family), his school reports as a child, cards he had written to his aunt Beatriz (adorably signed off in a childish scrawl - Ernestito), his microscope from his days as a medical student and then some items from his days as Comandante Che, like the chess set he played with when they were hiding out in the Sierra Maestra mountains in Cuba. Among the photos was one of him disguised as an old man for when he sneaked into Bolivia!