Viñales Valley and its caves, Cuba

The Viñales Valley is a karstic depression of 132 square kilometres in the Sierra de los Órganos, part of the Guaniguanico range, just north of Viñales in Pinar del Río Province. UNESCO inscribed it in 1999 as a World Heritage Site, and the reason is unusual: it was listed as a natural and cultural landscape, for its traditional tobacco-growing techniques as much as its geology.

Those techniques are labour-intensive and centuries old, and they are said to produce better tobacco than mechanised methods would. The valley floor is worked in small farms and villages that have been occupied since the time of the conquistadores, with some vernacular colonial architecture still standing. The culture is a mixture: indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans and their free descendants, Spanish colonisers and later Europeans.

The landscape is unmistakable for its mogotes, the steep limestone mounds standing out of the flat valley floor like islands. They are what is left when the rest of a limestone plateau dissolves away, and the flat ground between them is the reason the valley is farmed at all.

The mogotes are riddled with caves, and many can be entered from openings in the surrounding hill faces, among them Cueva del Indio and Cueva de José Miguel.

The listing is for a landscape rather than a monument, which is why the villages and the farms are inside it. Some of them have been occupied continuously since the conquest, and the vernacular colonial architecture that survives is part of what is protected.

It is the combination that carries the listing: the caves, the towers and the tobacco are one system, and the farming is only possible because of how the limestone weathered.