Today we take a break from the beaches of the island, to know one of the most beautiful natural areas of Cuba. The landscapes of Viñales Valley are National Monument, National Park and World Heritage Site of UNESCO.

The visit to this ‘Cathedral of the Tropical Carso’ as the zone it’s known, is essential for the most exuberant visitors, fans of nature and biodiversity, loaded with hundreds of keys to understand the evolution.

Not for nothing, the Viñales Valley is a huge outdoor prehistoric Museum. Karstic landscapes were many species of dinosaurs paraded and began to take shape about three hundred million years ago.

Constantly monitored by the great presence of the ‘mogotes’, these isolated mountains, elevated from nowhere, stony and old as the earth itself, this Cultural Landscape of Humanity is full of small villages of a single street.  On each side of the dusty roads, there’s the farmers’ houses who cultivate tobacco and other products.

It is a generous and fertile land which, however, requires patience, effort and hard work of the peasantry. But we should not forget that among the flora of this place we will find almost 20 endemic species, impossible to see in any other place on the planet.

It seems incredible that million years ago, by these high and mountainous lands, swam fishes on an immense sea. If we are lucky we will only have to bring us closer to one of these ‘mogotes’ and observe carefully. There are in the stone the footprints of the marine species of the past.

Creative Commons or Public Domain Image: Flickr/Romtomtom