In the heart of the world’s best tobacco croplands, a prehistoric valley wows visitors. Nobody can forget the mystical round-top hills or the peculiar smell of the tobacco plantations at daybreak.

If you look at the morning at sunup from the watchtower of Los Jazmines Hotel, maybe you’ll manage to understand why so many people from around the world compare Viñales’ mystical round-top hills to prehistoric pachyderms asleep in the middle of the valley.

Right there, trapped between the fog and the dawn, it’s not hard to imagine that one day, exhausted from centuries of motionlessness, these hills will shake off their backs and get on the move down the valley towards the mountain range.

Make no mistakes about it; Viñales is an enchanted land. A long way back, in the Jurassic Age, nature whipped this breathtaking geography into shape, putting round-top hills of limestone in place that erosion has worn away into an assortment of whimsical forms. These peculiar mountains are pocked by inner caves and hollows, many of them streamed by underwater rivulets.

No wonder UNESCO declared it a World Heritage Site in which natural charms go hand in hand with a rich history of traditions and legends –some of them harking back to the times before the foundation of the Viñales town in 1789- and are sprinkled by a prehistoric past of fossils and dregs of an era when these lands were buried under the water.

In this spot, perched on Cuba’s westernmost province, Pinar del Rio, travelers can drive down there from Havana in a four-hour trip. However, the homestretch before reaching the heart of the valley requires some extra driving skills, especially when hanging tough turns that lead up to the mountain range of the Sierra de los Organos.

When driving uphill, it’s impossible not to make a stop at the Los Jazmines Hotel’s watchtower for a spectacular view of the Viñales Valley; inside the Indio Cave –a part of it can be toured on foot and the remainder by boat; the Dos Hermanas (Two Sisters) Valley and the Prehistory Mural; and even the town, featuring picture-perfect little houses, some of them built in the 19th century. And don’t miss out on the Don Tomas House, serving an original stew and the Trapiche drink, made of a mixture of pineapple juice, rum, grapefruit slices, honey and a tiny piece of sugarcane stalk.

However, if you’re the kind of traveler who’d like to delve deeper into the mysteries of nature, then hop on to the Santo Tomas Cave, the longest cavern in Cuba and one of the largest ones in Latin America –as many as 28 miles long- with plenty of stretches that remain completely unexplored to date.

This cavern –like the Indio Cave- is one of many that slither inland into the ridge of the Sierra de los Organos, a mountain range that runs through the Pinar del Rio province and is also home to a good deal of round-top hills. These heights divide inner valleys like Dos Hermanas and Guasasa (Gnat), as well as the neighboring municipalities of Guanes, Minas de Matahambre or San Juan y Martinez.