Varadero Beach

Varadero occupies the Hicacos peninsula on Cuba's northern coast, a narrow spit running twenty kilometres into the Straits of Florida with beach along its entire ocean side. It is the largest resort area in the Caribbean by room count and it is not much like the rest of Cuba.

That separation is deliberate and old. Varadero was a wealthy resort before 1959 — the Du Pont family built an estate here in the 1920s that is now a restaurant — and after the revolution it was reopened to foreign tourism as a source of hard currency, with the peninsula managed as a zone. For decades Cubans could not stay in the hotels; that restriction ended in 2008, but the economics still keep most of them out.

The beach is genuinely first-rate: fine white coral sand, twenty kilometres of it, with shallow warm water, a gentle slope and reef offshore taking the swell. It faces north-east, so the morning light is on it. Sargassum reaches this coast in the summer months and hotels clear their frontage. The sand is fine enough that it does not hold heat the way silica does, which is why people walk it barefoot at midday, and the reef offshore is close enough that the water rarely gets choppy even when the wind turns.

Development is a continuous line of resorts along the peninsula with a town at the western end where people actually live. The beach is public along its whole length under Cuban law and you can walk it end to end, though everything behind it is allocated. Currency, connectivity and supply shortages are ordinary facts of a Cuban trip and are worth planning for rather than discovering.

Twenty kilometres of genuinely excellent sand behind a wall of all-inclusive hotels, public along every metre of it. Walk west into the town, where people live and food costs a fraction of the resort price, and take the excursion to Matanzas — the peninsula is not Cuba and does not claim to be.