Trinidad

Diego Velázquez founded the Villa de la Santísima Trinidad on 23 December 1514, among the first Spanish towns in Cuba, and tradition places the first Mass, said by Bartolomé de las Casas, on the little square now called the Plazuela del Jigüe. In 1518 Hernán Cortés recruited men here for his expedition to Mexico, and in 1527 the Narváez expedition stopped at Trinidad on its way to Florida, losing ships, horses and sixty men to a hurricane.

The town's great age came with sugar. From the late 18th century to the late 19th, the three valleys outside it — San Luis, Santa Rosa and Meyer — held more than fifty working mills, with over 30,000 enslaved Africans in the mills and cane fields. Railway lines were laid through the valley in the late 1880s to carry sugar to the port at Casilda. The planters' wealth built the mansions around the Plaza Mayor, and the Iznaga family raised a 45-metre tower on their estate.

When the sugar trade declined and the slave trade ended, and the wars of independence ruined many of the mills, Trinidad stopped growing, and that neglect preserved it. After the revolution the Escambray mountains became the base of an armed anti-government insurgency that the state fought until the mid-1960s, and Playa Ancón became one of the first new resorts. In 1988 the town and the Valle de los Ingenios were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Trinidad keeps the manners of an old colonial town. Its houses follow a local pattern: red terracotta roofs on projecting wooden beams, pastel walls with mouldings picked out in other colours, great doors with smaller doors cut into them, and windows with turned wooden bars instead of glass, so that rooms open almost directly onto the street. Families still live in many of these houses, around the old squares.

Music is the town's evening life. Salsa bands play on the steps beside the parish church at the Casa de la Música, trova is sung in the Casa de la Trova on the Plazuela de la Trova, and young Cubans dance to reggaetón and techno in a discothèque inside a large cave on the hill, once used as a hospital in wartime.

Religion and memory run deep. The figure of the Lord of the True Cross is said to have stayed in Trinidad because the ship meant to carry it to Veracruz was driven back three times by storms, and the people took this as a sign. A house on the square is still called the House of the Conspirators after the 19th-century nationalist society La Rosa de Cuba, which met there. Vendors sell drawn-thread tablecloths and linens at the craft market in the old centre, a local speciality.

The municipality of Trinidad had about 76,500 people in 2022, spread across 1,155 square kilometres that reach from the coast at Casilda to Topes de Collantes in the mountains. The town itself is divided into the barrios of Primero, Segundo and Tercero.

Tourism from abroad is a major source of income: many households rent rooms, cook for guests, give dance lessons, drive taxis or guide horse rides, and the town's economy rises and falls with international arrivals. Tobacco processing is the main industry. The contrast is visible on foot — the restored streets around the Plaza Mayor are kept well, while some neighbourhoods outside the tourist area are very run down.

Daily life follows the national pattern of low state wages, rationing, queues and long power cuts, with water shortages too, and like the rest of the centre Trinidad has lost many young people to emigration. In the evenings people gather outside the bars that sell cheap draught beer — they stay open as long as the beer lasts — and on the steps of the squares.

Trinidad eats the national staples — rice and beans, pork, chicken, yuca and plantain — with fish and shrimp from the coast at Casilda and Playa Ancón. Roast pork cooked slowly over an open fire is the dish for celebrations in the countryside, and the town's paladares serve seafood and Cuban classics in colonial courtyards. Many casas cook dinner for their guests, often the most reliable good meal in town, and cheap peso pizza from street windows feeds locals and travellers on a budget.

The town's signature drink is the canchánchara: aguardiente, a raw cane spirit, mixed with honey and fresh lime and served in small clay cups. Tradition links it to the independence fighters of the 19th century, and it was revived in Trinidad in the 1980s.

The Escambray behind the town grows coffee on small farms around Topes de Collantes, and the sugar plains supply guarapo, fresh sugar-cane juice. Mojitos and other rum cocktails are poured in the bars around the Plaza Mayor, where live music goes on late into the night.