Colonial 808

Excellent rooms in a beautiful colonial house from 1900. Rooms with air conditioner, private bathrooms, original furniture and much more. Linen and towel provided.

With plenty of trees and parks it is only a few minutes from everywhere. We can plan for you tours from Havana to Pinar del Rio and Vinales. Explore the Old City of Havana with its narrow streets and old buildings that constantly get renovated. Afterwards take a journey to Pinar del Rio and Viñales valley famed for its superb scenery. The tobacco fields you will see on the way are the principal fields of the tobacco industry.

Cuba is a reminder that life's simple pleasures are its most precious.

In its cities and towns, children play ball among decrepit houses. Neighbours congregate on door stoops to share gossip. Women hang laundry on improvised ropes outside windows lined with shattered glass. Car owners are seen patching up vintage Chevy and Ford jalopies from the 1950s and 1960s with self-made or Soviet-era auto parts.

The familiar signs of consumerism -- fast-food restaurants like McDonald's and billboards -- are nowhere to be seen. Violent crime is rare.

Indeed, Cuba is a tale of two worlds, one artificially created to resemble a sun lover's paradise and another engineered to be a socialist's paradise but in the end came up short. It's no accident the two remain out of sync. Beach resorts in the towns of Varadero and Cayo Coco feature guarded checkpoints to ensure the worlds don't collide.

All this makes Cuba a fascinating vacation spot because both spheres can be explored. Some of the most popular packages allow vacationers to split their time 50-50 between the beautiful white beaches of Varadero, the island's largest resort district, and Havana, the political, economic and cultural centre of the country filled with stunning, if often dilapidated, colonial architecture.

Even those who have booked their whole time in Varadero can plan day or one-night trips to Havana (only two to three hours away by car, bus or taxi). And for a richer taste of the real Cuba, there are numerous fine hotels in Havana catering to tourists. But you can also rent a room in one beautiful colonial styled house or an apartment with a great view to that beautiful Caribbean Sea, and share that part of a life that sometimes Cubans enjoy and we lost sometime ago. It is like to recharge batteries with humanity, happiness, romanticism and idealism.