• Cuba Guide

  • Introduction to Cuba
  • Weather
  • 27 things not to miss
  • Getting around
  • Entry requirements
  • Money
  • Public holidays

• Explore Cuba

  • Havana
  • Pinar del Río
  • Varadero and Matanzas
  • Cienfuegos and Villa Clara
  • Trinidad and Sancti Spíritus
  • Ciego de Ávila and Camagüey
  • Northern Oriente
  • Santiago de Cuba
  • Isla de la Juventud

• Cities

  • Camagüey
    
  • Cienfuegos
    
  • Gibara
    
  • Guardalavaca
    
  • Havana
    
  • San Isidoro de Holguín
    
  • Santa Clara
    
  • Santiago de Cuba
    
  • Trinidad
    
  • Varadero
    

Cuba Guide

Pinar del Río

The Viñales valley

• Hotels and campismos
• Casas particulares in Viñales village
• Eating
• Nightlife

The jewel in Pinar del Río's crown is the valley of Viñales, an official National Park and by far the most visited location in the province. With two fantastically located hotels, striking landscapes and an atmosphere of complete serenity, Viñales is an essential stop if you're in the province or anywhere near it. Though only 25km north from the city of Pinar del Río, the valley feels far more remote than this, with a lost-world kind of quality, almost entirely due to the unique mogotes, the boulder-like hills which look like they've dropped from the sky onto the valley floor. These bizarre limestone hillocks were formed by erosion during the Jurassic period, some 160 million years ago. Rainfall slowly ate away at the dissolvable limestone and flattened much of the landscape, leaving a few survivors behind, their lumpy surface today coated in a bushy layer of vegetation.

Most of the population lives in the small village of Viñales, which you'll enter first if you arrive from the provincial capital or Havana, and where there are plenty of casas particulares. From the village it's a short drive to all the official attractions, most of which are set up for tour groups, but it's still worth doing the circuit just to get a feel of the valley and a close look at the mogotes. There are a number of places in Viñales difficult to find or impossible to access if you're not on an organized excursion but, conversely, a stay in any of the casas particulares often yields information otherwise unavailable to tourists.

There are two ready-made, worthwhile day-trips from the valley, well suited to a stay of a couple of nights or more in this area, both of which can be as easily done independently as on an excursion. The closest is the Gran Caverna de Santo Tomás, an impressive and complicated set of caves set in the limestone rock of a hulking mogote. The nearest beach is at Cayo Jutías Cayo Jutías, further afield but easily reachable by car and still relatively undisturbed.