Viñales Valley

Pinar del Rio - Pinar del Rio City

Valley of Viñales is one of the parts of Cuba that is best known internationally. A beautiful peaceful and romantic village, the main street with small houses all painted in different colors. Viñales is located in one of the most beautiful areas of Cuba, in specific for people who love nature and a quiet peacefull atmosphere is Viñales a must see.

In the late 1900s, UNESCO has declared the Valley of Viñales to be a part of world cultural heritage, and it is also a national monument. The valley has a surface area of 132 km² and is a part of Sierra de los Organos, in Pinar del Río province. It is the most outstanding example of karst valleys in Cuba. This fertile area is surrounded by hills with vertical sides and rounded tops, called mogotes (pin-cushion hills). With 140 to 400 m high, they are the only hills of this kind in Cuba. They contain many caves, some of them created by underground rivers (which are navigable in part), which form one of the most extensive cave systems in Latin America.

Deep in the valley bottom you find cultivated lands (mainly tobacco, taro and bananas) and scattered peasant houses, all forming a rural landscape of great beauty. The surrounding sierras abound in caves, making it an area of speleological interest. Outstanding among them are Cueva del Indio, a cave which San Vicente River runs through, and Cueva de José Miguel. Further west, the Santo Tomás cave system, criss-crossed by 45 km of galleries, is one of the largest in Hispanic America.

The flora is an important element in the Viñales Valley. Cuban endemic plants found there include: the Ceibón Tree, Palmita de Sierra, Cayman Oak and a kind of palm tree; a living Jurassic fossil that can only be found in a small area of Pinar del Río. There are also many endemic animal species, especially birds like Hummingbirds, the Cuban Trogon, Tody, Mockingbird and a small paserine birds that inhabits pinewoods