• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1407 0

view, La Ermita takes top honors for architecture, interior furnishings and all-round services and quality. It’s also a lot less frenetic, thanks to the absence of any tour buses. Among a plethora of extracurricular attractions are an excellent pool, skillfully mixed cocktails, tennis courts, a shop, horseback riding and massage. Rooms with views are housed in handsome two-story colonial edifices and the restaurant is an ideal perch for breakfast. You can walk the 2km downhill to the village or the Viñales tour bus Click here stops outside.

Hotel Los Jazmines (Cubanacán; 79-62-05; s/d incl breakfast CUC$56/70; ) Inhale deeply and prepare yourself. The vista from this pastel-pink colonial-style hotel is one of the best and most quintessential in Cuba. Open the shutters of your classic valley-facing room and drink in the sight of magnificent mogotes, rust-red fields and palm frond–covered tobacco drying houses shimmering in the early morning mist. While no five-star palace, the Jazmines benefits from its unrivaled location, gloriously inviting swimming pool and a host of handy extras such as international clinic, massage room and small shop/market. The setting comes at a cost: bus tours stop off here every hour or two destroying a little of the ethereal ambience. The hotel is 4km south of Viñales on the road to Pinar del Río.

Eating & Drinking

Viñales home-cooking is some of the best in Cuba – eat at your casa particular! The following places are OK if you’re stuck for lunch.

El Estanco II ( 10am-11pm) A simple pizza and beer place 1km out of town on the road north, and a decent pit stop. A pizza costs a couple of Convertibles, a plate of spaghetti slightly more.

Restaurante Las Brisas ( 79-33-53; Salvador Cisneros No 96; 11am-2pm & 6-9pm) This place serves deep-fried chicken and congrí (rice) for peanuts, or you can pick up a lunchtime grilled cheese sandwich at either the Patio del Decimista or the Centro Cultural Polo Montañez (see below).

Restaurante La Casa de Don Tomás ( 79-63-00; Salvador Cisneros No 140; 10am-11pm) The oldest house in Viñales is also its best restaurant – by default (there’s no real opposition). The casa, with its terra-cotta roof and exuberant flowering vines, is suitably salubrious and the food’s OK if you stick to the house special, las delicias de Don Tomás, a rich mélange of rice, lobster, fish, pork, chicken and sausage with an egg on top (CUC$10). There’s an atmospheric deck out back.

Viñales’ mercado agropecuario (agricultural market) is about 100m from town at the west end of Salvador Cisneros down the road toward Dos Hermanas. Get your peso rum and Convertible bread here.

Entertainment

Centro Cultural Polo Montañez (cnr Salvador Cisneros & Joaquin Pérez; admission after 9pm CUC$2) Named for the late Pinar del Río resident turned guajiro hero, Polo Montañez, this open-to-the-elements patio off the main plaza is a bar-restaurant with a full-blown stage and lighting rig that comes alive after 9pm.

Patio del Decimista (Salvador Cisneros No 102; admission free; music at 9pm) Smaller but equally ebullient is this long-standing place that serves live music and cold beers.

Cine Viñales (cnr Ceferino Fernández & Rafael Trejo) The settlement’s only cinema is a block south of the main square.

Shopping

ARTex (Salvador Cisneros No 102) You can get postcards, T-shirts and CDs here. It’s attached to the Patio Decimista.

Estanco de Tabaco (Carretera de Puerto Esperanza Km 1; 9am-5pm) A good choice for cigar shopping, next to Estanco II.

Getting There & Around

BUS

The Víazul ticket office (Salvador Cisneros No 63A; 8am-noon & 1-3pm) is opposite the main square in the same building as Cubataxi (below). The daily Víazul bus for Havana via Pinar del Río departs at 8am and 2pm daily (CUC$12). At the time of writing only the second bus stopped in Las Terrazas.

There are also daily transfer buses to Havana (CUC$15), Soroa (CUC$12) and Las Terrazas (CUC$12); and a daily – except Tuesday – service to Cienfuegos (CUC$25) and Trinidad (CUC$40). The transfers to Cayo Levisa (CUC$29, two person minimum),