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Trinidad is a city caught in a time warp. Its streets embroidered by cobblestones and pebbles, its sidewalks made of bricks and tiles, its original cord-guided layout, coupled with an uneven urban structure, bear out the feeling of a charming chaos that captivates visitors in the twinkling of an eye

Perched on some kind of knoll, hedged with mountains and near the sea, it shows off the vastness of a valley like the Mills, home to the region’s largest sugar development during the first half of the 19th century. Ostentation and capital buildup coming from a fledgling sugar-based aristocracy –so proud of its city- prompted the emergence of buildings, not only of mighty sugar mills and factories with their surrounding mansions, but also of a highly peculiar urban layout.
A place made out for the first time in 1494 during Admiral Christopher Columbus’ second voyage to the Caribbean, Diego Velazquez described to the Spanish monarchs in 1513 as a land of “huge rivers, springs and gold mines.”
The lands of Trinidad, across from the Jagua Bay, were inhabited by aboriginals that ended up enslaved by the Spanish settlers in their obsessive quest for gold. In 1514, they chose the banks of the Arimao River to set up their first village. A year later, the Holy Trinity found its final home on the same spot where the conquistador spent the Christmas of 1513 together with cacique Manatiguahuraguana.
Trinidad’s architectural niceties, the mandatory pedestrian character of its oldest and narrowest streets, its lavish linkage to the local scenery, the survival such traditions as earthenware, tobacco, sugar and the manufacturing of precious stuffs, like embroideries, fabrics, spooling, thatch and wicket, no doubt make it place sought after by visitors from everywhere under the sun.
Generation after generation built this legacy that, as Havana City Historian Eusebio Leal says, “was piled up on its pristine and fertile lands, where traditions and family customs were laid out in the form of arts and trades, in genuine and highly spiritual cultural expressions, just to create a part of Cuba’s invisible soul.