Long before the community of Las Terrazas existed, the hills of the Sierra del Rosario were the scene of an intense coffee-growing development in the early 19th century. The protagonist of that boom was a wave of French settlers who came to Cuba fleeing the Haitian Revolution —then the French colony of Saint-Domingue—, where they owned plantations they lost after the abolition of slavery and Haitian independence.
These settlers found in the cool, humid slopes of the Sierra del Rosario an ideal terrain for growing coffee, and established in the area numerous coffee plantations worked by enslaved people brought from Africa. Houses for the landowners, coffee drying floors, mills and barracks for the enslaved were built. For some decades, coffee was a prosperous crop and the sierra experienced an era of relative agricultural wealth.
Over time, however, coffee growing in the area declined, largely displaced by sugar and affected by crises and hurricanes. The plantations were abandoned and nature gradually covered the ruins. But the real problem that remained was environmental: the intensive logging to open the coffee fields and, later, other forestry operations, left the slopes eroded and bare. That degradation of the landscape would, paradoxically, be the starting point of the project that would give rise to Las Terrazas more than a century later. Today, ruins like those of the Buenavista coffee plantation are the best-preserved testimony to that coffee-growing and slave past.
The birth of Las Terrazas as we know it today dates back to 1968, when the Cuban State launched an ambitious reforestation and recovery project in the Sierra del Rosario. The aim was to reverse the severe erosion and deforestation left by centuries of logging and coffee-plantation exploitation, returning the forest to slopes that had been left bare and vulnerable to soil loss.
The technical solution adopted gave the place its name: to halt the erosion on the steep slopes, the workers built enormous stepped terraces on the hillsides by hand, an agricultural and soil-conservation technique that allowed the earth to be retained and trees to be planted. On those terraces millions of trees were planted —timber, fruit and native species—, in one of the great reforestation operations of 20th-century Cuba. From those 'terraces' built on the terrain comes directly the name of the community.
To carry out such an effort a stable workforce was needed, so around the project it was decided to create a community to house the families of the forestry workers. Thus, in the early 1970s, the town of Las Terrazas was born, with its characteristic stepped houses around an artificial lake created in the valley. What had begun as an environmental operation also became a social experiment: a new town, conceived from scratch to live in harmony with the forest that was being recovered.
The success of the reforestation project radically transformed the landscape of the Sierra del Rosario. In a few decades, the eroded, bare slopes were covered with a lush forest, recovering the water cycle, the soils and the biodiversity. The sierra filled with life again: numerous species of plants and animals, many of them endemic to Cuba, returned and prospered, and the area became an example of ecological restoration.
That achievement received a first-rate international recognition in 1985, when UNESCO, through its Man and the Biosphere (MAB) Programme, declared the Sierra del Rosario a Biosphere Reserve, the first in Cuba to obtain that category. The distinction recognized both the natural value of the place and the development model that combined environmental conservation with the presence and well-being of a human community: exactly what Las Terrazas represented.
The biosphere reserve status consolidated the place's conservationist vocation and laid the groundwork for its future as an ecotourism destination. The sierra became a protected and studied space, with trails, research areas and management rules aimed at reconciling tourist visits with the preservation of the recovered ecosystem. Las Terrazas was thus inscribed within a globally recognized framework of environmental protection.
From the 1980s and, above all, the 1990s, Las Terrazas took a new step in its evolution: from a forestry and community project it also became an ecotourism destination. The beauty of the recovered forest, the rivers and pools, the coffee-plantation ruins and the singular character of the community offered a tourist appeal different from the sun and beach that dominated the Cuban offering, oriented toward nature and sustainability.
The symbol of that turn was the construction of the Hotel Moka, opened in the 1990s, a pioneering ecohotel designed to integrate into the forest as respectfully as possible, to the point that living trees pass through its structures. Along with the hotel, a whole visit infrastructure was developed: signposted and guided trails, arranged areas at the San Juan river pools, restoration of coffee-plantation ruins like Buenavista, artists' workshops open to the public and activities like bird watching or the zip line over the lake.
This orientation made Las Terrazas a Cuban model of nature tourism and sustainable development, frequently cited as an example of how to combine conservation, community and tourism. The town's inhabitants, in many cases descendants of those forestry workers, got involved in the tourist activity as guides, artists, casa particular hosts and service workers.
Beyond its forestry origin and its natural value, Las Terrazas stands out for something unusual in a small mountain town: a surprisingly rich cultural and artistic life. Over the years, the community attracted and trained painters, ceramists, musicians and craftspeople, who set up their workshops and galleries in the town itself and opened their doors to visitors.
This artistic vocation is part of the place's identity. Exploring Las Terrazas also means visiting the artists' studios, seeing them work, chatting with them and, if you wish, acquiring original works: paintings, ceramics, objects made with recycled materials or inspired by the nature of the sierra. Some of these creators achieved recognition, and their home-workshops became prominent points of visit in the community. Music also has its space, with figures and cultural projects linked to the town.
That combination —recovered nature, environmental awareness, organized community and artistic life— makes Las Terrazas a unique case in Cuba and a destination that goes beyond a simple walk through the forest. For the traveler, it's the chance to see an experience of sustainable development born of the will to green a mountain, and to discover how, on the ruins of the old coffee plantations and the once-eroded slopes, not only a forest grew, but also a creative community proud of its history.