Other three squares and their adjacent constructions invariably wake up the interest of the visitors: the Square of the Cathedral, surrounded by opulent mansions; the Old Plaza, where the Counts of San Juan de Jaruco house stands out; and the Square of San Francisco de Assisi, next to the church and the equal convent names, in one of whose cloisters are the Museum of the Sacred Art.
But to walk for the streets of the Old Havana many of these even paved, it also represents the possibility to come closer to more than a dozen of museums and famous Cuban plastic artists' study-galleries; to visit Benito Juárez house, that of Asia, Africa, Puerto Rico, and of Simón Bolivar, and of the Arab, where it is the only room for the Muslim prayers that it exists in Cuba.
It is also interesting to traffic for the Alameda de Paula, a beautiful walk built in the second half of the XVIII century; or to cross the bay to arrive to the ultramarine towns of Casablanca, where the Christ from Havana is erected, and it Regla, where it is the Sanctuary of Nuestra Señora de la Virgen de Regla, seamen and fishermen's protector, patron of the Bay of Havana.
The Morro-Cabaña Historical-Military Park conformed by two havens of the magnitude of the Castillo de los Tres Reyes Magos del Morro (1630) and the San Carlos de la Cabaña Fortress (1774), classified in its moment like the summit work of the fortified defensive system. In fact from this last fortification every night it is shot, at nine o’clock, a salvo gunshot that in attractive ceremony it remembers the times when impressive flashes (in hours of the dawn and to the evening) they constituted the conventional sign to open up or to close the walls of the city, and to place or to move away the enormous wooden floating chain and brass that gave access to the port of the Villa.
To discover the call outside Havana, however, it is as exciting as to retrace the narrow streets of the old city. Havana was growing under the influence of the constructive more average dissimilar of the orb ,and in its lands found space the Renaissance, the Mudejar, the Baroque, and the Cuban Baroque, the Neoclassicism, the Eclecticism, the Art-Nouveau, the Art-Decó and the Pragmatism.
This way, to the other side of the useless wall symbolic places like the Paseo del Prado, the Great Theater of Havana and the Capitol appeared, one of the most splendid buildings in the capital and in whose interior is the Statue of the Republic, the third more high of the world indoors, and to whose feet is the diamond that marks the kilometer zero of the Central Highway.
There was also born the famous Havana Seawall, of about 12 kilometers of longitude and considered the most characteristic image in the city that connects to the traditional center with the populous quarter of El Vedado from whose heart, La Rampa can be consented easily to other places of tourist interest as the bicentennial University of Havana, the Square of the Revolution, and the José Martí Memorial (the highest observatory in the city, with 138,5 meters high on the level of the sea), or Columbus's Necropolis considered among the most important in the planet by its multiple artistic values.
Towards both sides of the center of the city there are points of remarkable interest also. In address west, the Fifth Avenue leads to the residential quarter of “Miramar” that acts as orbit of the managerial world and of business, and where it is possible to visit the impressive Havana Miniature Drawing. The Palace of Conventions, the ferial enclosure Pabexpo and the exclusive Club Havana precedes to the tourist community Marina Hemingway, an appropriate place to practice the fishing of height, to participate in a seafaring to the coralline barriers, or to navigate in a comfortable yacht conditioned on board for the life.
Towards the east of the city and after crossing the Tunnel of the Bay, you arrive at the town of fishermen of Cojímar that invites to remember the lingering stay in Cuba of the Prize Nobel of Literature Ernest Hemingway who found many of the scenarios and characters of his works precisely there.
More than 15 kilometers of coastal fringe, fine sands and blue waters and extend between Bacuranao and Guanabo conforming a nautical circuit that the persons from Havana identify simply as the Beaches of the East, and in which it usually highlights for its natural attributes Santa María del Mar.
Also heading for the east of the capital, to only 15 kilometers of the center, a small town been founded in 1733 starting from the existence of miner-medicinal waters invites to know its historical, architectural, cultural and natural values: Santa María del Rosario.
As all capital cities, Havana is the heart of the intense political, scientific and cultural life of the nation. Dozens of museums, theater rooms, and of concerts, art galleries and cultural institutions have their seat in the city and some as the National Ballet of Cuba, the House of the Americas, the Foundation of the New Latin American Cinema, or the National Folkloric Group enjoy enormous international prestige.
And, of course, it is also a city where the good food to eat, and the amusement, has an important space in places so well-known as La Bodeguita del Medio, the Floridita, or the Tropicana Cabaret or in other fewer mentioned, but that already have a reserved space in the preference of the thousands of tourists that every year travel to the Cuban capital.
The Cuban capital is also the capital of the provinces Havana City and Havana, and it is without doubts, the tourist destination par excellence of the biggest of the Antilles, and inside this, its historical center, World Heritage, is a point of forced reference for as much as visitor arrives to this city. |
