Some 20 to 30 minutes inland from town you’ll find the other component of Trinidad´s UNESCO World Heritage Site: a three-valley region collectively called the Valle de los Ingenios (Valley of the Sugar Mills), where among the ruins of 70-some sugar mills you can get a sense of what plantation life was like at select sites such as Guachinango, where the casona (“great house”) is mostly intact, and especially Manaca Iznaga, where in addition to the casona you can see some slave quarters and climb the iconic Torre Iznaga (above), an actually rather fetching, 147-foot (45-meter) masonry tower, built in 1816 and once Cuba’s highest structure, from which overseers could keep a better eye on the slaves going about their business below. They've also in the years since my first visit added a restored steam train to boost the tourist trade.

Read more in my post The Colonial (and Beachy!) Charms of Trinidad, Cuba.

PHB.cz (Richard Semik)