Alejandro de Humboldt

Declared in 1996 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2001, it is named after the Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who visited Cuba in 1800 and 1801 and was so struck by its biodiversity that he later described it as comparable to the Amazon he would go on to explore. It is the largest and most important remnant of rainforest in the insular Caribbean, with exceptional endemism thanks to the great geological diversity of its soils, which include some of the oldest ultramafic rocks in the Caribbean. It holds the Cuban solenodon, one of the most primitive living mammals on the planet — its lineage split from other mammals more than 70 million years ago and has come down virtually unchanged since the age of the dinosaurs — and now critically endangered.