Travel and Tourism in Cuba

Old Havana and the UNESCO World Heritage Site

Old Havana — Havana Vieja — was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1982, one of Cuba's first such designations. The historic center and its system of fortifications represent the best-preserved colonial city in the Caribbean and one of the finest in the Americas, containing more than 3,000 buildings of historical significance spanning five centuries of construction. The Oficina del Historiador de la Ciudad, the City Historian's Office led for decades by the visionary Eusebio Leal Spengler until his death in 2020, has overseen an ambitious program of restoration that has transformed large sections of the historic center from picturesque ruin into carefully restored architectural masterpiece — while ensuring that the restored area continues to be inhabited by Habaneros rather than converted entirely into a tourist zone.

The heart of Old Havana is organized around four principal squares, or plazas, connected by the narrow streets and lanes of the colonial grid. Plaza de Armas, the oldest public space in Havana, was the original center of colonial power. On its eastern side rises the Palacio de los Capitanes Generales, built between 1776 and 1791 in Cuban baroque style, which served as the residence of Spanish colonial governors, American military commanders during the occupation, and republican presidents — and today houses the Museo de la Ciudad de la Habana, the City Museum, whose collections provide an exhaustive account of Havana's history. The square itself is shaded by laurel trees and filled on most days with secondhand book vendors offering a mix of genuine Cuban literary and political texts alongside revolutionary memorabilia.

A short walk north and east from the Plaza de Armas lies the Plaza de la Catedral, arguably Havana's most architecturally distinguished square. The Cathedral of San Cristóbal de la Habana, built in the eighteenth century in the Cuban baroque style that characterizes the city's finest colonial architecture, dominates the square's northern side with a facade of asymmetrical towers and rippling carved stone that has been described as music turned into stone. The cathedral was built by the Jesuits and was completed after their expulsion from the Spanish empire in 1767; it housed the supposed remains of Christopher Columbus from 1796 until they were transferred to Seville following Cuban independence in 1898, though some Cuban historians maintain that the genuine Columbus remains stayed in Havana. The square around the cathedral is today lined with galleries, restaurants, and artisan markets, and the Havana Club rum bar on the square's corner has been a gathering place for decades.

The Plaza Vieja, or Old Square, is the most recently restored of Old Havana's principal squares, having been converted to a parking lot during the mid-twentieth century before being reclaimed for pedestrians and restored to its colonial character. Surrounded by buildings spanning the architectural styles of four centuries — from seventeenth-century colonial to early twentieth-century Art Nouveau — the square now houses a craft brewery, a camera obscura offering panoramic views, photography galleries, and restaurants at all price points. Children play in its central fountain while tourists photograph the parade of classic American cars navigating the surrounding streets.

The UNESCO Colonial Jewel of Trinidad

Trinidad, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List together with the adjacent Valle de los Ingenios in 1988, is the most perfectly preserved colonial town in Cuba and one of the finest in the entire Americas. Located on the southern coast of the Sancti Spíritus province, approximately 300 kilometers from Havana, Trinidad was founded by Diego Velázquez in 1514 and grew through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a modest colonial settlement. Its transformation into a wealthy city came in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with the sugar boom, when the plantations of the surrounding Valle de los Ingenios generated fortunes that their owners poured into the construction of magnificent mansions, churches, and public buildings.

The historic center of Trinidad — its cobblestoned streets, its stepped plazas, its baroque and neoclassical architecture in shades of yellow, blue, pink, and terracotta — has been preserved with extraordinary fidelity because the city's prosperity collapsed as suddenly as it had risen. When the sugar industry of the Valle de los Ingenios declined in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Trinidad was left economically stranded, unable to afford either modernization or demolition of its colonial fabric. The city entered a long twilight of picturesque poverty that paradoxically preserved everything that made it beautiful. The revolutionary government, recognizing the city's architectural significance, undertook systematic preservation in the 1960s and 1970s that prevented further decay, and UNESCO inscription in 1988 brought international resources and attention to the task.

The centerpiece of Trinidad's colonial architecture is the Plaza Mayor, the main square, surrounded by the most important civic and religious buildings of the colonial city. The Palacio Brunet, now the Museo Romántico, contains perhaps the finest collection of nineteenth-century Cuban furniture and decorative arts in the country — the intimate rooms of the mansion, their walls hung with period portraits and their tables set with French porcelain, evoke the world of the sugar barons with an immediacy that museum installations rarely achieve. The Palacio Cantero, occupied by the Municipal History Museum, offers the best panoramic views over Trinidad's tiled rooftops from its tower. The Church of the Holy Trinity, the parish church that faces the plaza, dates from the early nineteenth century and contains a celebrated figure of the Señor de la Vera Cruz — the Lord of the True Cross — venerated by Trinidadenses with particular devotion.

Trinidad is also famous for its vibrant music scene and the immediacy with which traditional Cuban music permeates everyday life. The Casa de la Trova on Echerri Street hosts afternoon and evening performances of son, salsa, and trova by local musicians of considerable skill. The Palenque de los Congos Reales, housed in a colonial building in the center of the city, offers performances of Afro-Cuban percussion and dance that connect directly to the African cultural heritage of the sugar plantation era. On warm evenings, the steps of the Museo de Arquitectura Colonial — broad stone steps below an old colonial arcade — become an open-air dance floor where tourists and locals mix in a nightly salsa lesson and celebration that costs nothing to observe and perhaps a small tip to participate.

Viñales, a UNESCO Cultural Landscape

The Viñales Valley in Pinar del Río province, designated a UNESCO Cultural Landscape in 1999, is widely considered Cuba's most spectacular natural landscape. The valley occupies a broad, flat-floored depression in the Cordillera de Guaniguanico, enclosed by the rounded limestone hills — mogotes — that rise abruptly from the valley floor like green whales breaching from a sea of red earth and tobacco. The mogotes are remnants of an ancient limestone plateau that has been eroded over millions of years, leaving these isolated vertical-sided remnants standing incongruously in the valley. Their cave systems, carved by underground rivers, are among the most extensive in Cuba.

The Valley of Viñales is above all a working agricultural landscape, and its UNESCO designation explicitly recognizes the traditional farming practices that have shaped and maintained its distinctive character. The red earth of the valley floor — deeply colored by iron-rich soils — supports the finest tobacco plantations in Cuba. The Vuelta Abajo region of Pinar del Río province produces tobacco leaves of such consistently high quality that they are acknowledged worldwide as the finest raw material for cigar making. The combination of soil chemistry, humidity, temperature, and the particular microclimate created by the surrounding mogotes produces a tobacco of extraordinary flavor complexity that no other region has been able to replicate.

Visiting a tobacco farm in the Viñales Valley is one of Cuba's most instructive and authentic travel experiences. The farmers — vegueros — who tend the tobacco follow traditional methods that have changed relatively little in generations. The delicate tobacco seedlings are germinated in covered nurseries before being transplanted by hand into the prepared field rows. The growing plants require constant attention — removing suckers, monitoring for disease and pests, managing irrigation. At harvest, the large outer leaves are cut first, then progressively the inner leaves over several weeks. The harvested leaves are strung on poles and hung in the distinctive ventilated curing barns — casas de tabaco — where they dry over a period of weeks before being bundled for processing. Many vegueros offer tours of their operations and informal demonstrations of hand-rolling technique, concluding with the offer to purchase hand-rolled cigars directly — a practice of questionable legality but nearly universal practice.

The cave systems beneath and within the mogotes provide some of western Cuba's most memorable excursions. The Cueva del Indio, named for indigenous rock paintings found within its caverns, allows visitors to boat through an underground river that penetrates deep into the heart of a mogote, the electric lights of the tourist route giving way to dramatic blackness punctuated by illuminated stalactites and stalagmites of great beauty. The Gran Caverna de Santo Tomás, the largest cave system in Cuba, extends for more than forty-five kilometers of mapped passages and requires serious caving equipment and guides for exploration beyond its tourist route.

Horseback riding through the Viñales Valley is the quintessential way to explore the landscape beyond the main tourist areas. The dirt tracks and farm lanes that wind between the mogotes and across the tobacco fields are perfect for horses, offering access to small farms, rural communities, and viewpoints inaccessible by road. The mirador overlooking the valley from the hilltop terrace of the Hotel Los Jazmines is perhaps the most famous viewpoint in western Cuba, offering a panorama of extraordinary beauty at dawn or dusk when the light angles dramatically across the mogotes and the valley glows in shades of green and red.

Western Cuba's Other Attractions

The María La Gorda dive site at the far western tip of Cuba, on the Península de Guanahacabibes, offers some of the finest diving in the western Caribbean. The peninsula juts into the Gulf of Mexico at Cuba's most remote and least-visited corner, accessible by a long drive on deteriorating roads or by liveaboard from Havana. The diving here rewards the effort with exceptional visibility, prolific fish life, and coral formations of exceptional health and diversity. The Guanahacabibes Biosphere Reserve that encompasses the peninsula protects nesting habitat for several sea turtle species and one of Cuba's most intact areas of natural forest.

Las Terrazas, in the Sierra del Rosario Biosphere Reserve in Artemisa province, is an eco-community and resort that represents one of Cuba's most successful experiments in sustainable development. Founded in the 1960s as part of a reforestation project that has restored forest cover to a previously degraded landscape, Las Terrazas today combines attractive casitas accommodation, excellent birdwatching — the area supports more than a hundred bird species including several Cuban endemics — hiking trails, waterfalls, swimming holes, and the restored ruins of nineteenth-century coffee estate buildings with an integrated community of some 1,000 residents who live and work within the reserve. The Soroa Orchid Garden nearby maintains one of the largest collections of orchid species in Cuba, including many endemic varieties.

Varadero and Beach Cuba

Cuba's premier international beach resort, Varadero occupies a slender peninsula jutting into the Florida Straits from the Hicacos Peninsula in Matanzas province, approximately 140 kilometers east of Havana. The beach itself — 22 kilometers of fine white sand lining calm, turquoise-to-azure water of exceptional clarity — is genuinely one of the finest beach environments in the Caribbean, and the resort complex that has developed along its entire length over the past three decades represents Cuba's most significant investment in tourism infrastructure.

Varadero operates largely as an all-inclusive enclave, with the major international hotel chains — Spanish, Canadian, and others — operating large resort complexes that provide most of what their guests need within the property boundary. The Cuban government, which controls the resort through joint ventures with foreign operators, has been criticized for creating a two-Cuba system in which foreign tourists enjoy standards of accommodation and service unavailable to ordinary Cubans, and for allowing a degree of racial discrimination in resort hiring that favors lighter-skinned Cubans. Whatever one's views on the ethics of all-inclusive tourism in a socialist state, Varadero's beach is undeniably spectacular, and the diving and snorkeling opportunities in the surrounding waters, including the Playa Coral reef just east of Varadero, are excellent.

The Zapata Peninsula and the Bay of Pigs lie south and west of Varadero along the southern coast of Matanzas province. The Zapata Biosphere Reserve encompasses the largest wetlands system in the Caribbean — a vast landscape of mangroves, swamp forest, and freshwater lagoons that supports extraordinary biodiversity including the Cuban crocodile, the Zapata wren, the Zapata rail, and the Zapata sparrow, all of which are found nowhere else on Earth. Birdwatching in the Zapata is among the finest in the Caribbean, and the lagoons support significant populations of flamingos, roseate spoonbills, and other wading birds.

The Bay of Pigs beaches — Playa Girón and Playa Larga — are today quiet and pleasant diving destinations whose historical resonance adds an unusual dimension to a beach holiday. The Museo Girón at Playa Girón documents the 1961 invasion from the Cuban government's perspective with characteristic revolutionary partisanship, displaying captured American weapons, photographs, maps, and a detailed account of the three-day battle. The diving off Playa Girón is surprisingly excellent — the waters of the bay are clear and warm, the coral is healthy, and the bay's documented military history adds the occasional artifact of Cold War confrontation to the underwater landscape.

Cayo Coco and the adjacent Cayo Guillermo, connected to the main island by a long causeway through the shallow Boca Grande lagoon, represent the most developed of Cuba's northern key resorts. The resort beaches here are exceptional — long, white, powder-fine sand fronting absolutely flat, turquoise water protected by the offshore reef — and the natural setting of the keys, with their mangrove edges, flamingo colonies, and the extraordinary birdlife of the lagoons, gives them an ecological richness unusual in an intensive resort environment. Ernest Hemingway visited Cayo Guillermo regularly during his years in Cuba, and his novel Islands in the Stream draws extensively on the fishing experiences he had in these waters.

Baracoa, Cuba's Oldest City

Baracoa, at the far eastern tip of Cuba in Guantánamo province, holds a unique place in Cuban history and geography. Founded by Diego Velázquez in 1511 as Cuba's first colonial settlement, Baracoa remained for centuries one of the most isolated places in Cuba — cut off from the rest of the island by the Nipe-Sagua-Baracoa mountain range, accessible only by sea or, after the opening of the La Farola mountain highway in 1964, by a spectacular mountain road that climbs through cloud forest before descending to the coastal plain. This isolation has given Baracoa a distinctive character unlike any other Cuban city — more humid, more lush, more overtly tropical, and with a local culinary tradition quite different from the rest of Cuba.

The landscape around Baracoa is dominated by El Yunque, a flat-topped mountain rising to 575 meters above the coast whose distinctive profile was noted by Columbus in his 1492 diary entry as a landmark along the northeastern coast of Cuba — possibly the earliest European geographical description of any specific feature in the Americas. El Yunque is visible from virtually everywhere in Baracoa and provides a constant visual orientation point for the city.

Baracoa's cuisine reflects its isolation and its distinctive agricultural production. The area around Baracoa is Cuba's principal cacao-growing region, and chocolate production — in both artisan and commercial forms — is a point of local pride. The chocolate factory in the city produces a dark, intensely flavored chocolate that is sold throughout Cuba. Baracoa's local cuisine makes extensive use of coconut — coconut milk appears in numerous preparations, from rice dishes to seafood stews — and the cucurucho, a cone of shredded coconut mixed with sugar, honey, guava, or papaya and wrapped in a palm leaf, is the signature street food and souvenir of the region. Baracoa's seafood, particularly fresh fish and crab prepared in coconut milk sauces, is among the finest in Cuba.

Cuba's Nine UNESCO World Heritage Sites

Cuba holds nine UNESCO World Heritage Sites, reflecting the extraordinary concentration of natural beauty, archaeological significance, and colonial architectural heritage in a single island nation. Old Havana and its Fortification System was inscribed in 1982, Trinidad and the Valle de los Ingenios in 1988, San Pedro de la Roca Castle in Santiago de Cuba in 1997, the Desembarco del Granma National Park (the marine terraces and mangrove systems where Castro's revolutionary expedition landed in 1956) in 1999, the Viñales Valley as a Cultural Landscape in 1999, the Archaeological Landscape of the First Coffee Plantations in the Southeast of Cuba in 2000, the Alejandro de Humboldt National Park in 2001, the Urban Historic Centre of Cienfuegos in 2005, and the Historic Centre of Camagüey in 2008.

Camagüey's historic center, the least visited of Cuba's UNESCO cities despite its extraordinary character, preserves the largest collection of colonial urban architecture in Cuba outside Havana. Founded in 1514, Camagüey developed an idiosyncratic labyrinthine street plan — said to be deliberately confusing to deter pirate attacks — that creates a pedestrian urban environment quite unlike any other Cuban city. The city is also famous for its large tinajones, the great clay water jars that were used for water storage and that have become the symbol of the city, and for the remarkable concentration of colonial churches — including the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Mercy and the Iglesia de la Merced — that survive in remarkable condition.