The topography of Havana includes a varied assortment of hills, ridges, plateaus, valleys and plains, so that the scenery never becomes monotonous; and with the numerous automobile drives that radiate from the Capital, shaded with the luxuriant foliage of royal palms, bamboo and other forms of tropical vegetation, it offers to the tourist and traveler an almost endless panorama of charming change and pleasant surprise. The average altitude of Havana province is slightly lower than that of either Matanzas or Pinar del Rio, bordering on the east and west. Columbus, on his second voyage of discovery, cruised along the southern coast of Cuba until he reached a point a little west of the Indian village of Batabano. Here he heard of another island not far to the south. Leaving the coast he threaded his way through shoals and scattered keys, that even up to the present time have been only imperfectly charted, and finally, on July 12, 1494, landed at some place on the northern shore. He called this island the Evangelist. It is the largest of a chain of keys running parallel with this part of the south coast, irregular in form with an area of approximately eight hundred square miles, and forms the southern half of the judicial district of Havana. Columbus remained here, taking on fresh water and wood, until July 25, and then began his return voyage east, sailing over shoals that displayed so many varying shades of green, purple and white, that his mariners are said to have become alarmed. Some twenty years later Diego Velasquez cruised along the southern coast to a point west of the Guines River, where he founded a city, which he called San Cristobal de la Havana. The fifty odd colonists whom he left behind soon became dissatisfied with the general surroundings of the spot which he had selected for their abiding place and moved over to the north shore of the Island near the mouth of the Almandares River, which they found in every way more agreeable as a place of permanent residence. In 1519 a second move was made to the Bay of Carenas, where they located permanently on the harbor, destined soon after to become the most important port of the West Indies. The inhabitants of that irregular group of palm thatched huts little dreamed that four centuries later the Port of Havana would have a foreign commerce whose tonnage is excelled by only one other in the Western Hemisphere. With the exception of the low, grass-covered plains of the southern shore, the topography of the Province of Havana is undulating and picturesque. The northern shore, throughout most of its length, especially from the City of Havana west to Matanzas, rises more or less abruptly from the beach until it reaches a rather uneven plateau, several hundred feet above the level of the sea.