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 alli-
gator 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 hollo-
wed 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.
