Pinar Del Rio Guide

Cuba's westernmost province of Pinar del Rio boasts two of the six UNESCO Biosphere Natural Reserves on the Cuban archipelago and contains the Valle de Viñales or Viñales Valley, also declared a World Landscape Heritage Site by UNESCO for its strange and stunning mogotes, round-topped, cliff-like hills covered with lush vegetation. Pinar del Rio is also the region where the country's, and arguably the world's, finest tobacco is grown.

The Pinar del Río province contains one of Cuba's three main mountain ranges, the Cordillera de Guaniguanico, divided into the easterly Sierra del Rosario and the westerly Sierra de los Organos. These provide for a preponderance of fertile valleys, called hoyos, and the mogotes which much are essentially flat-topped buttes made of limestone and peppered by caverns and subterranean rivers.

Along the coast there are excellent yacht anchorages, clear waters,spectacular corals and great expanses of empty white-sand beaches.

Also scenes of oxen tilling red-earth fields and cowboy peasants, called guajiros, on horseback, are commonplace.

Travel Guides by Province