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The road from Puerto Baquerizo Moreno rises swiftly into the misty highlands. Passing through about 8km of orange groves, you'll reach EL PROGRESO , a peaceful village of wooden, stilted houses, banana plants and fruit trees. It was founded in the 1870s by Manuel Cobos , an entrepreneur who tried to colonize the place with a hundred convicts. They planted orchards, sugar cane and vegetable gardens, built a sugar mill, and enjoyed modest success for a while. But, 960km away from the gaze of authority, El Progreso began to slip into brutal tyranny. Cobos paid his workers in his own invented currency only redeemable in his shop. He owned the island's only boat too, so in effect, his workers were prisoners and slaves. An increasingly savage overlord, he regularly beat them, once flogging six to death, and abandoning a man on Santiago and another on Santa Cruz, leaving them for dead. The Santa Cruz castaway survived for three years eating iguanas and cactus pads, and may have been rescued sooner had Cobos not left a sign reading 'Do not take this man away. He is twenty times a criminal'. The bloody retribution came when Cobos was hacked to pieces by the desperate colonists in 1904, on the spot where he'd recently had five people shot. There's a simple restaurant in the village, La Quinta de Cristi , and a little further up the road, La Casa del Ceibo (tel 05/520475 or 520248; $5-9), which takes the prize for the most peculiar hotel in the archipelago. A precarious bridge of rope and wire takes you 14.5m up into San Cristobal's tallest tree - a 200-year-old ceibo - to a tree house equipped with sleeping mats, fridge, cooker, bathroom, and a fireman's pole for the shortcut to the ground. It's own restaurant is no less eccentric: the walls are constructed from over 20,000 bottles of beer piled high, while the kitchen and paths are made of plastic crates. There's an irregular bus service to the village, but taxis can take you for less than $2. It'll take under an hour to get there on a bike , though it's uphill all the way.
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