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The
Viñales Valley has been on UNESCO’s World
Heritage List since November 1999 as a cultural landscape
enriched by traditional farm and village architecture.
Old-fashioned farming methods are still used
in Viñales, notably to grow tobacco. The local
population is an ethnic mix that illustrates the cultural
development of the Caribbean and Cuba in particular. |
- Source:
Report of the 23rd session of the World Heritage Committee,
in Marrakesh, Morocco, 4 December 1999.
Hiking
Tours in Viñales Valley
Check
out our Viñales Specialized Tours page.
Cuba-Junky can help you with booking a good guided hiking
tour or visit to a farm and talk to the farmers
Click Here
>>
| Lost
in the smoke of time |
Reina
María Rodríguez, Cuban poet and novelist, author
of La Foto del Invernadero (Casa de las Americas prize, 1998)
and Te daré de comer como a los pájaros (La
Habana, Letras Cubanas 2000). (Source: UNESCO.org)
 |
The
Viñales Valley, near the western tip of Cuba, is
a magical landscape of hills and caves where life centres
on growing tobacco. A Cuban writer recalls discovering
this World Heritage site through books well before setting
foot there |
In
the west side of the Cordillera de Guaniguanico, at the
foot of the Sierra de los Órganos, lies a region
of limestone outcrops known as mogotes. These huge round-topped
hummocks rising out of the ground emerged from the sea
more than two million years ago and were formed during
the Jurassic period. Born in the vicissitudes of history,
the land still bears the marks of precipices, chasms and
seams carved out by erosion.
Tobacco grows in the valley—strange red leaves almost
starved by the salty soil but brought to life by permanent
sunshine. |
 |
I
always dreamed of the Viñales Valley but never
ventured there. In school I could touch the lush tobacco
leaves pictured in textbooks and see the caterpillars
that live off them, slowly and avidly taking on the aroma
of tobacco before devouring the plant. |
My
life was that of the concrete city, though the sensation left
by dew on my hand was so strong that I still recall it as
if it were real. The leaf, bright and green like a child,
turns a deep toasted brown before it is smelt, chewed or burnt,
becoming like time itself and ending up, in old age, as wisps
of smoke.
Farmers,
most of whom came from the Canary Islands, arrived around
1800 and began cultivating tobacco across the region, which
is commonly known as the Vuelta Abajo. Two hundred years later,
tobacco is still the lifeblood of the Viñales Valley,
which produces 661,000 quintals of it every year. Only the
best leaves get sent to Havana, where hundreds of workers
called torcedores and anilladores handroll them into cigars.
Cuba produces 65 million cigars a year, packed in cedarwood
boxes and exported to the entire world.
 |
Growing
tobacco calls for patience. Some even say that the plant
grows better if you speak to it. Once the seeds are sown
(between October and December), the moment to reap and
pack is of critical importance, marking all the difference
between acidity, sourness or waste-product. |
The
valley is like its tobacco—discreet, thrifty and tranquil,
stuck in the same serene pocket of time as its villagers.
People who have never been to the Viñales Valley, in
the Cuban province of Piñar del Río, should
know that it boasts a unique variety of plant and animal life,
some of it in danger of extinction, such as the cork palm,
the agabe, the macusey hembra, the alligator oak and the dragon
tree. Unaccustomed to the ways of civilization and to music
unlike their own songs, the valley’s birds also come
in a kaleidoscope of species, with names as evocative as the
pine-forest grass quit, the mockingbird and the totí.
 |
Exploring
caves to the tune of haunting tales
It was here that the Guanajatabey Indians built their
primitive homes in caves hollowed out of the limestone
mogotes, where relics of this nomadic people have been
found along with fossils of Pleistocene mammals embedded
in the rock. Deep inside the caves, albino fish swim and
butterfly bats flit.
|
Some
caverns, such as the Cueva del Indio, rediscovered in 1920,
have close to four kilometres of underground streams which
can be explored in a small dinghy so long as you don’t
mind listening to all the scary tales the peasant guides love
to recount.
As the streams slowly work through the limestone and mix with
the mogote clay falling from above, they become solutions
of minerals and coppery earth, both of which are then deposited
on the roofs and walls of the caves, turning the surfaces
ochre milky green, rendering the scenery all the more mysterious.
We are only 150 kilometres from Havana, but millions of years
away.
Where
Nature invites painters to take place
 |
Returning
to Viñales is a bit like returning to a museum.
A silence hangs over it, a mysterious calm that dwells
in the early morning mist. In Viñales village we
visit a church built in the last century with sombre pews
that have been repaired countless times. The musty odour
mingles with the smell of warmed-up food. Heavy rainfall
in the wet season has spoiled the splendid facades of
the houses, which now look like faded mosaics. |
And
Cuban hands, always touching and caressing things, cherishing
the past, have worn out the fine wooden railings at the front
of the houses. As in every village in my country, Viñales
also has a central square—a byword for order amid confusion.
Four kilometres from the village, on one side of the Dos Hermanas
(Two Sisters) mogote, stands the Mural of Prehistory, a impressive
120-metre high fresco painted by Cuban artist Leovigildo González,
disciple of the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Depicted are
the animals and other creatures that lived in the valley in
prehistoric times.
 |
People
who have not read the poem of José Lezama Lima
(1912-76), Bajo el arco de Viñales (Beneath the
arch of Viñales), or have never seen the paintings
of Cuban artist Domingo Ramos or contemplated the Mural
of Prehistory, should know that this valley, which rose
from the bottom of the ocean near the western tip of the
island, is above all a place of art, a site where Nature
provides the frame and waits for the painter to be seated. |
But
how does one take leave of the valley? Through its cliffs,
its hollows? Through the passage in a mogote and its columns
of gentle stalagmites? Through the long line of big-belly
palm trees with their fiery plumes lit by summer? Through
its chattering streams full of blind fish? Through the echoes
of cockfights left in an old sugar factory? Or through a cheap
painting on the yellow wall of a restaurant somewhere in Havana’s
tourist district? Which path home is best?
Cuba-Junky's
Recommendation! Hotel Los Jazmines
|
One
of the most beautiful locations to stay, overlooking
Vinales Valley with a stunning sunset and sunrise. In
specific for those who love nature and a peacefull ambiance.
-
Jazmines SlideShow >>
-
For Reservations >> |
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