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Cuba Trinidad Hotels
Trinidad Presentation and Overview
Trinidad was founded in 1514, but despite this early start it remained a backwater haven for smugglers until the late 18th century. Smugglers brought slaves and gold from British-controlled Jamaica, but all this changed in the early 19th century when a slave revolt in Haiti caused French planters to flee to Trinidad, where they re-established their mini-empires. Trinidad boomed until the Wars of Independence devastated the region's sugar plantations and the town again fell into obscurity. The legacy of this short-lived sugar-boom wealth can be seen in the town's baroque church towers, Carrara marble floors, wrought-iron grills and run-down mansions. The most impressive of all Trinidad's many museums must be Museo Histórico Municipal. A visit to the Taller Alfarero, a large ceramics workshop where traditional techniques are still used is also worthwhile. Some of Cuba's finest beaches are just outside Trinidad.
Trinidad City, whose days of prosperity are preserved in aspic, is, quite simply, one of the finest colonial towns in all of the Americas. Wholly disproportionate to its small size, Trinidad ranks as one of Cuba's greatest attractions. Only a few square blocks of cobblestone streets, pretty pastel-colored 18th- and 19th-century houses, palaces, and plazas, Trinidad can be seen in just a few hours. But its serenity is so soothing that many visitors are easily coaxed into much longer stays. Magically frozen in time and tastefully scruffy where it needs to be, the streets tend to be more populated by horse-drawn carts than automobile traffic, and old folks still crouch by windows, behind fancy wrought-iron grilles, to peer out at passersby.
Founded in 1514 on the site of a native Taíno settlement, Villa de la Santísima Trinidad was the fourth of Diego Velázquez's original seven villas. Trinidad quickly grew and later prospered in princely fashion from the sugar-cane industry concentrated in the outlying Valle de los Ingenios. The sugar boom that took root by the mid-1700s created a coterie of wealthy local sugar barons, who built magnificent estates in the valley and manor houses in town and imported thousands of African slaves to work the fields. Trinidad's golden age, though, proved to be short-lived. Slave uprisings on plantations, intense European competition and, finally, independence struggles throughout the Caribbean all took their toll on the Cuban sugar industry.
When the bottom dropped out of sugar by the 1860s, Trinidad's economy collapsed and the town drifted into obscurity. Its economic failure in the late 19th century is a true blessing in the 21st: Trinidad escaped further economic development and modernization that surely would have obscured the colonial nucleus that UNESCO honored as a World Heritage Site in 1988. Even in the 1950s, in pre-revolutionary, capitalist Cuba, the beauty and historical value of Trinidad prompted the government to declare it off-limits to further development.
Trinidad has very much been discovered, not only by those exploring the "real" interior Cuba, but also by package tourists in beach resorts who visit on organized day trips. However, the massive tourism infrastructure normally associated with a star attraction hasn't yet invaded Trinidad. The only large and upscale hotels are located beyond town; most independent travelers stay in any of Trinidad's 300-plus casas particulares, an option that seems appropriately low-key and authentic in this fetching town.
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