Cuba's great cave runs for roughly 47 kilometres under the Quemado range in Pinar del Río, about 170 km west of Havana, and it is arranged in seven stacked levels.
The lowest one is still working. The Arroyo Santo Tomás flows through it, and the system as a whole acts as the main drain for a mountain range 400 metres high. Visitors are taken through level six, the layer directly above the river, which stays dry except when floods push water up into it. The levels above that are older and show it, with collapsed ceilings and worn formations.
Antonio Núñez Jiménez led members of the Sociedad Espeleológica de Cuba into it on 18 September 1954, and the dates that follow read more like a national history than a cave one. Between 1957 and 1959 Fidel Castro and his revolutionaries used it as a hideout. The National School of Speleology was founded here in 1984. On 5 June 1989 it was declared a National Monument by resolution 59. It opened for tourism in 1994.
The entrance passages are 10 to 20 metres wide, and the military used them during the Cold War, which is why the speleothems near the mouth are visibly worn.
There is no electric light and there are no paved paths. Visitors are handed helmets with caplamps instead, and the guided route covers 2,000 metres in about ninety minutes over level, compacted cave clay tracked flat by earlier feet. Leaving the light out also leaves out lampenflora, the algae and moss that colonise lit show caves and work at the rock.
Getting to the mouth costs you a 150 metre climb in Cuban heat. Inside is not cold, but it is cooler.
Surveyed length is 46,250 metres with a vertical range of 89 metres, running from 113 to 202 metres above sea level. It was the longest cave in Cuba for many years and now sits second.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
