If you would like to read my full Cuba travel blog click on this link and start at "Revolutionary Cuba, laid-back Havana (1)"

Founded in 1514 by a Spanish conquistador, Trinidad was just the third settlement on the island of Cuba but it sank into obscurity not many years later when Cortez passed through and recruited most of the settlers to join him in his highly successful expedition to Mexico. After a hundred or more years when its claim to fame was as a centre for piracy and illicit slave trading, the town leapt back to prominence with the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century arrival of French settlers and the establishment of a booming sugar industry – by 1850 Trinidad accounted for perhaps one third of Cuba’s total sugar production. A few years later, however, as the wars of independence took their toll on this region, the focus of sugar cane production shifted elsewhere, and Trinidad went into a recession from which it would not recover until tourism produced something of a recovery about thirty years ago.

The good news from all of this is that the grand buildings erected on the proceeds of the sugar boom have remained pretty well unaltered over the past hundred and thirty years since there was little economic activity to warrant anyone’s investment. And with a timely adoption as a World Heritage Site in 1988, restoration work has been largely faithful to the original designs.

The main Plaza Mayor is an exquisite miniature of a grand square and, as I write this, it is one of the few squares in the world I can instantly visualise just thinking about it. It is exceptionally attractive, with half a dozen modestly sized main buildings and the parish church of Santísima Trinidad, a relatively utilitarian late nineteenth century edifice on the northeast corner. One of the beautifully proportioned buildings is the two-storey Palacio Brunet built in 1808 and converted into the Museo Románitico, full of delightful eighteenth and nineteenth century furnishings. Nearby, just off the Plaza Mayor, is the iconic pastel yellow bell-tower of the former San Francisco de Asis convent, now a museum about the 1960’s war against the “hill bandits”. Right in front is a tiny square boasting a magnificent Flame of the Forest tree carrying the densest blossoming of stiff, bright, orange flowers I have ever seen.