A green oasis in Varadero, Josone is a public park with multiple entertainment facilities, such as rental row boats and water bikes, a tourist train circulating around premises, multiple cafes and restaurants, as well as the on-site villa Retiro Josone, which once belonged to a couple of a local rum distillery owners and was expropriated after the revolution.

The beguinages of Flanders and the Netherlands are always oases of calm and stillness, where you might still expect to see an old beguine mumbling her prayers in a doorway. Two of Ghent’s three beguinages have been included on the UNESCO World Heritage list. Although the Old St Elizabeth Beguinage, in Begijnhofdries in Ghent, is no longer enclosed by a wall, making it simply part of the city, it still has a unique atmosphere. Today the Old St Elizabeth Beguinage is known as ‘holy corner’, a place of religious tolerance, because it has no less than three different churches: one is Roman Catholic, one is Orthodox and the other is Protestant. From bleachfield to orchard This open beguinage grew into something of a ‘beguine city’ in the 13th century, with a church, the ‘Grootjuffer’s House’, an infirmary, a chapel, more than a hundred houses for beguines, a bleachfield (a field where linen was laid out to bleach) and an orchard. After the French Revolution, with increasing industrialisation, the inhabitants moved to their new beguinage in Sint-Amandsberg in 1873.

Perhaps the area's most important archaeological site, the Ambrosio Cave contains drawings that date back two millennia, and is a curious attraction for those not threatened by its murky insides (inhabited by dozens of bats and various eerie cavernous creatures).