Cuba

A French-influenced colonial city founded in 1819 on a deep-water bay, with a distinctive grid of wide tree-lined boulevards and colonnaded streets that gives it a more optimistic, open feel than colonial Havana.

The most approachable of Old Havana's restored squares, enclosed by colonial mansions and crumbling Art Deco blocks, where daily Cuban life unfolds without museum glass between the visitor and the city.

Cuba's second-largest city and its most Afro-Cuban in character, set on a deep-water bay surrounded by the Sierra Maestra mountains, with the massive 17th-century Castillo del Morro fortress guarding the harbour entrance.

A perfectly preserved colonial city founded in 1514, set against the backdrop of the Escambray Mountains and the Valle de los Ingenios sugar plantation zone, both part of its UNESCO World Heritage inscription.

A 20 km peninsula of white-sand beach on Cuba's north coast, lined with resorts and known for its turquoise shallows and consistent Atlantic swell.

A landscape of dramatic limestone karst formations (mogotes) rising from a flat agricultural plain in western Cuba, where traditional tobacco farming has continued with little change for centuries and which was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999.