Viñales is a valley of red earth in the west of Cuba where tobacco is still ploughed behind a pair of oxen, and limestone towers three hundred metres high stand up out of the fields. The towers are mogotes, what remains of a limestone plateau after the rest of it dissolved away. They are sheer on the sides, rounded on top, forested to the crown and riddled with caves. From a shaded veranda on the valley's rim you read the floor field by field, red earth and royal palms broken by the grey domes of the rock. If you stay until the sun drops, the towers shift from grey to warm copper while the fields sink into shadow. Mist starts to collect between them as the light goes.
Down on that floor the work is done by hand. Vegueros plough, plant and cut the leaf, then hang it in the casas de tabaco, the thatched barns scattered across the fields. There it is sewn into pairs, draped over poles and left in the dark for about fifty days, turning green to gold to brown. Dirt tracks cross the valley between the rows, which you take on foot or on horseback, past banana plots and stands of palm with the cliffs rising on either side. At Cueva del Indio, once a shelter for the valley's Indigenous people, the passage runs back into the rock until it meets an underground river, and a small boat takes over for the last stretch. On the flank of the Dos Hermanas mogote a painting of snails, dinosaurs and human figures sprawls some 120 metres up bare rock, commissioned in 1961 and among the largest outdoor murals anywhere. On the slopes above it grows the cork palm, a cycad from the age of the dinosaurs that has held on here and nowhere else. By law most of each crop goes to the state factories in Havana. What the farmer keeps he rolls himself, and in the barn you can watch one go from leaf to finished cigar in a few minutes and then smoke it.