With the Gulf of Mexico to its north and the Caribbean Sea to its south, Pinar del Río is the westernmost and the fourth-largest province in Cuba, covering 8,884 sq km (3,430 sq miles). That’s equivalent to 8.1% of Cuba’s total land area.

Pinar del Rio used to be bigger, but in 2005, authorities created the new province of Artemisa from the now-defunct La Habana province as well as a large chunk of eastern Pinar del Río. That cost Pinar almost one-fifth of its former territory, along with some key industries and 21% of its former population.

Yet this isn’t the first time Pinar del Río has been shrunk in size. In 1976, the province lost its eastern portion then including Mariel, Artemisa and Guanajay municipalities to enlarge the province of La Habana. Since then, Pinar has lost 3,090 sq km (1,193 sq miles) of its original territory to other provinces.

Pinar del Río’s distinctive landscapes along with its relative isolation and its unusual agricultural profile set it apart from the rest of the country. It is shaped by a contrasting and scenic combination of forested mountains and towering hills with cultivated landlocked valleys and wide flat plains.

The Guaniguanico mountain system is formed by two very different ranges: the Sierra del Rosario to the east and the Sierra de los Organos to the west.

The system rises to 692 meters (2,270 feet) above sea level at the Pan de Guajaibón, which is now in Artemisa province. To the south, an ample alluvial plain is the ground for most agricultural activities and the largest settlements.

Pinar del Río’s natural drainage has been largely diverted in the last 40 years to serve agricultural needs, particularly rice paddies. The province’s 24 major reservoirs hold a combined 780 million cubic meters.

An extensive network of channels and culverts built in times of abundant energy has radically transformed the natural water runoff of the southern alluvial plain.

But Cuba’s current economic crisis makes it impossible to properly maintain and operate this system, which lies largely neglected.

Salinized soils and aquifers in the southern coastal flatlands pose a different threat, especially for rice farmers, and have ruined soil productivity in some areas. Excessive regulation of the runoff, careless irrigation practices and seawater intrusions are blamed for the problem, which now affects 54,000 hectares, or 10% of the province’s agricultural land.

INFRASTRUCTURE

At the end of 2012, Pinar del Río province had 585,452 inhabitants, equivalent to 5.2% of Cuba’s total population. The provincial capital, also called Pinar del Río, was founded in 1669 and is currently Cuba’s 8th-largest city, with 140,164 people.

Other smaller towns include Consolación del Sur (26,953 in 2002, the last available year); Los Palacios (16,753); San Juan y Martínez (12,439); Guane (12,016) and Sandino (10,159).

A swarm of small villages, each with 5,000 to 10,000 inhabitants, are scattered throughout the province. Together, they’re home to 92,000 people, or 16% of the total. The remaining pinareños accounting roughly for one-half of the total population live in tiny rural settlements, while around 2,000 people live in rural huts. This unusually high share of people living in small villages results from the centuries-old tradition of tobacco growing, a crop that demands a highly skilled labor force to care for small plots of land.

INFRASTRUCTURE

Pinar del Río’s paved road network reaches all settlements and agricultural zones. Its main arteries are the four-lane National Highway and the old, two-lane Central Highway, both linking the province to Havana. The Central Railroad stretches west to the small village of Guane.

Tobacco, by far the province’s leading export, has traditionally been shipped out of Havana, home to all the top cigar factories. Pinar del Río has no civilian airport with regular services, but an executive airport six miles south from the provincial capital has in the past supported limited charter flights to Havana and Nueva Gerona, capital of Isla de la Juventud to the south. A military air base exists at San Julian, to the west.

ECONOMY

Along with its borders, the economy of Pinar del Río has been recently reshaped. Tobacco is not just the leading product, but virtually the only one with any real export value. Both sugar and coffee exports have dried up. So have the rice paddies with their intricate waterworks and access to the otherwise-irrelevant ports of Bahía Honda and Cabañas.

Unfortunately for Pinar del Río, the province has no major manufacturing industries, its once-productive copper mines are exhausted and tourists rarely stay for long.

Pinar del Río is invariably identified with tobacco cultivation, even though tobacco accounts for only 9% of its total cropland. Tobacco farming and trade has driven the territory’s assimilation since late 17th century. The Vueltabajo region, an appellation of origin that eventually became the province’s surname, produces the best-quality black tobacco in Cuba.

Tobacco is cultivated in the west, on high, sandy, loose and well-drained acidic soils that demand constant fertilization. Tobacco requires a skilled workforce and is cultivated in relatively small plots cared by hand leaf by leaf by a single family or a few laborers. Consequently, in the tobacco-growing areas, rural population is dense.

Cured tobacco leaves are sent to factories in Havana, where cigarettes and cigars are manufactured.

However, the tobacco industry seems to be sailing through rough seas. Unprocessed tobacco leaves output have fallen by 28%, from 16,500 tons in 2006 to 11,800 tons in 2011. Production of rolled cigars dropped by 19% over the same period, from 6,700 to 5,500 tons.

Pinar del Río accounts for 13% of the rice produced in Cuba. Yet yields at the large state-run rice farms in the low, flat alluvial plains south of Los Palacios have dropped dramatically since the onset of the “special period” in the early 1990s. Unable to restore that lost capacity, the Cuban government now favors the development of small family-grown rice paddies which are far less demanding in resources.

Sugar also played a key role in the province’s agricultural economy but when the easternmost municipalities were severed from Pinar del Río to form Artemisa province, Pinar lost its sugar mills and sugarcane lands.

The same soggy conditions that make Pinar del Río a good rice-growing region work against it when it comes to sugar. One sugar mill, Manuel Sanguily (formerly Niagara), located in northeastern Pinar del Río province, was dismantled in 2002.

In 2000, Pinar del Río exported 121,260 tons of raw sugar, worth $21.9 million at world market prices. That was less than half the 250,000 tons produced annually during the 1980s, then worth $125 million at the preferential prices paid by the former Soviet Union.

At one time, Pinar del Rio accounted for about 7% of Cuba’s total citrus output. In 1989, citrus orchards covered 1,435 hectares or 13% of the total. Production peaked in 1988 at 65,362 tons, but a decade later, as many farms were abandoned, it had fallen to about a third of that.

As is the case throughout Cuba, citrus orchards in Pinar del Río fell victim of the citrus greening plague (also referred as Huanglongbing or Yellow Dragon plague) that annihilated all farming in the province. Pinar del Río’s output for 2011, the last available year, was 23,331 tons of citrus, down from an average 31,920 tons a year for the 2006-11 period.

Traditionally oranges made up over half of all citrus output in the province, but now grapefruit account for 71% of the total, with limes another 7% and oranges and other citrus fruits comprising the remainder.

Cultivated and spontaneous pastures, often overgrown, comprise one-third of Pinar del Río’s agricultural lands. Authorities claim that 39% of the province is still covered with forests, an unusually high ratio compared to other provinces. Pine forests many planted after the 1960s cover 137,000 hectares (338,500 acres); they grow well over the schist and serpentine hills to the west, but have disappeared from the loamy plains in the south to make rooms for agriculture.

Semi-deciduous forests and rainforests cover the Guanahacabibes peninsula and part of the mountain ranges, which have been decimated by careless farming practices.

After Cuba lost its supply of cheap timber from the former Soviet Union, its authorities turned to the island’s own limited reserves. In 2011, timber production reached 2.28 million cubic feet, down from 3.5 million cubic feet in 2006 and about 6.0 million cubic feet in 2002.

One byproduct of timber production is pine resins, but Cuba’s output is nowhere near its potential. In 2011, Pinar del Río produced 347.6 tons of mostly unprocessed resins, down from 403 tons in 2006 and 1,238 tons in 2002. Experts believe the province’s pine forests could one day yield up to 5,000 tons of resins annually.

Copper mining was a traditional endeavor in Pinar del Río, but low world market prices discourage this activity. The Matahambre copper mine, an epitome of the island’s mining industry, was closed in 1997 when its ore reserves ran out after 84 years of activity.

Some small deposits of lead, zinc, copper, gold, quartz sand and phosphorite have been mined in the past, while iron, bauxite and nickel reserves have been discovered. Gold has been exploited at the Castellanos mine, yielding some 9,600 ounces a year, but the mine is currently idle.

Fisheries and the canning industry complement the economy of the province. Lobster and tuna are the most valuable species captured and processed at La Coloma, whose canning facilities are among the most important in Cuba.

TOURISM

So far, Pinar del Río has missed out on the huge investment Cuba has made in tourism elsewhere across the island and there’s no indication this will change in the near future. What little tourism activity there is seems to be concentrated in the Viñales area, which known for its outstanding natural beauty.

The province has 563 hotel rooms, or only 0.8% of Cuba’s total hotel capacity. Fewer than 200 rooms in third-category hotels meet the lowest standards of international tourism; the rest don’t even come close.

A surprisingly high 392,297 foreign tourists visited Pinar in 2011, or 14% of all tourists arriving in Cuba, but on average they spent less than two days in the province. Most of them (81%) come for a few hours’ excursion to the scenic Viñales valley. Before the revolution, the hot springs at San Diego de los Baños lured thousands of visitors many from the United States and the town had several hotels. Today, a 30-room hotel and spa serves a handful of visitors.

In 2011, Pinar del Río generated only $1.35 million in profits on $38.5 million in total tourism revenues. With 96 cents spent for every dollar earned, operational costs for tourism are clearly too high to make tourism a viable alternative for Pinar del Río.

However, compared to the 64,384 tourists who visited in 2000 and the 222,009 who came in 2006, the sector is rapidly growing and it’s surprising what a difference can make a few occasional visitors to reanimate a dormant economy.

Viñales, with 7,600 inhabitants and 2,200 houses, has a surprisingly high number of B&Bs, private inns, restaurants, fruit vendors and handicraft sellers that obviously sustain a type of business not yet registered in Cuban official statistics.