El Nicho is a staircase of waterfalls: a chain of cascades and clear turquoise pools strung along the Hanabanilla River as it drops through the Sierra del Escambray in central Cuba. Named basins like La Cristal and Poceta de los Enamorados stack one below the next, each spilling into the one beneath it. The tallest single drop, Salto El Nicho, falls about fifteen metres into a pool wide enough to swim across. All of it lies inside Gran Parque Natural Topes de Collantes, a mountain reserve protected since the 1980s. The forest around the pools is dense with endemic life: more than ninety kinds of orchid, hundreds of ferns, and the tocororo, Cuba's national bird, flashing through the canopy. Guides across the island routinely call it the finest waterfall in Cuba.
The pleasure here is the descent. A forest path of about a kilometre and a half — the Reino de las Aguas, or Kingdom of the Waters — winds down through ferns, orchids and constant birdsong to the foot of the main cascade. You climb over roots and wet stone and cross small wooden bridges between the pools. At the bottom the water is cold enough to catch your breath even in the tropical heat. The reserve stays open year-round and the river never stops flowing, but the seasons offer different things. After the summer and autumn rains the cascades run fullest and loudest; the dry months from November leave the pools at their clearest and calmest turquoise. This is the easiest way in Cuba to trade the beaches and colonial squares for the cool green quiet of the mountain interior, and it is close enough to both Cienfuegos and Trinidad to do in a morning.