Viñales Valley

The Viñales Valley is a flat floor of red earth and tobacco fields ringed by mogotes, steep-sided limestone hills with rounded, forest-covered tops that rise abruptly from the plain, some of them as high as 300 metres. They are the remnants of an ancient karst landscape, honeycombed with caves, and nothing quite like them is found elsewhere in the Caribbean; the closest relatives of this scenery are in South-East Asia. In the morning mist, with the hills floating above the fields the valley is one of the most beautiful landscapes in Cuba.

It is also a working landscape. The valley lies in the Sierra de los Órganos in Pinar del Río, the province that grows Cuba's finest tobacco, and farmers here still work in traditional ways: ploughing with oxen, planting and harvesting by hand, and curing the leaves in wooden drying houses that stand among the fields. Growers hold that this labour-intensive method produces better tobacco than machines would. UNESCO inscribed the valley in 1999 as a cultural landscape, recognising the farms, the scattered houses and the village of Viñales as much as the hills themselves, and the area is also protected as a national park.

The mogotes hide a world underground. Caves such as the Cueva del Indio and the Cueva de José Miguel can be visited, and climbers have opened routes on the limestone walls. On the cliff face of one hill, begun in 1961 and some four years in the making, the enormous, 120-metre-long and rather startling Mural de la Prehistoria by Leovigildo González Morillo depicts the evolution of life in bright colours. Walking or riding a horse between farms at sunset, when the hills turn dark against an orange sky and the smell of tobacco hangs around the drying houses, is the experience most people remember.

Getting there

The village of Viñales sits at the edge of the valley, about 1 km from its centre. Havana lies roughly 180 km to the east by road, and José Martí International Airport (HAV), 20 km south-west of Havana, is the practical gateway; Víazul runs a daily bus from Havana to Viñales, taking about four hours. Check timetables before travelling.