Havana: what to see, where to stay and how to get around

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The scale of the fortifications here only makes sense once you know what Havana was. From 1561 the Spanish crown required every ship carrying silver and gold from the Americas to assemble into a single convoy, and Havana was the assembly point: once a year the entire wealth of the empire sat in this harbour waiting for the wind. That is why there are four fortresses around a bay this size, why a chain was stretched across the mouth at night, and why the old city is built the way it is. Four squares, two kilometres, and start at eight before the heat.

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A short history of Havana

The Spanish moved Havana to its present site in 1519, on the shore of a deep bay, and for centuries the treasure fleets carrying silver and gold from the colonies to Spain gathered here. To protect it, forts were built at the harbour entrance and a wall around the city. In 1762 the British captured it and held it for less than a year. In 1898 the American warship Maine exploded in the harbour, which led to the war between the United States and Spain. In 1959 Fidel Castro entered the city at the head of the revolution. In 1982 Old Havana was declared a World Heritage Site, and the old American cars on its streets are a relic of the embargo.

The ten best sights in Havana

1
Plaza de la Catedral
The cathedral facade is deliberately asymmetrical — the two bell towers are different widths
2
Plaza de Armas
The oldest square in the city; the street along one side is paved in wood, to muffle carriage noise
3
Palacio de los Capitanes Generales
1791, and it was the Spanish governor’s palace, then the presidential palace, and is now the city museum
4
Castillo de la Real Fuerza
1577 and the oldest stone fortification in the Americas; the weathervane on it is the city’s symbol
5
Plaza Vieja
It was a car park until 1996; there is a camera obscura in the tower on the corner and it works
6
Plaza de San Francisco de Asís
The square the Spanish treasure fleet unloaded at; the church is now a concert hall for its acoustics
7
Castillo de los Tres Reyes del Morro
1589 to 1630, at the harbour mouth; a chain was stretched from here to La Punta to close the bay at night
8
San Carlos de la Cabaña
Built 1763–74 after the British took Havana; it was the largest colonial fortress in the Americas
9
Castillo de la Punta
The other end of the harbour chain, finished 1600; it is small, free and almost always empty
10
Capitolio Nacional
1929, and taller than the Washington one on purpose; a diamond in the floor marks kilometre zero of Cuba

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Tours in Havana →

A guide in your headphones: open the walk on our site, walk from stop to stop, and at each one your phone tells its story. No guide, no group, and free. This is the first walk in Havana:

Free walking tours in Havana

The strongbox of an empire

Plaza de Armas · The oldest square in Havana and the one the governors lived on. The street along the palace side is paved in wooden blocks rather than stone, and the reason is specific: a nineteenth-century governor could not sleep for the noise of carriage wheels on cobbles, so the stones were taken up and replaced with end-grain timber, which is almost silent. It is still there.
Castillo de la Real Fuerza · Finished in 1577 and the oldest stone fortification anywhere in the Americas, built after a French privateer sacked the city in 1555 and burned it. It turned out to be useless — it sits too far inside the harbour to stop anything entering — which is why the two fortresses at the mouth were built afterwards. The bronze weathervane on its tower, La Giraldilla, is the symbol of Havana and is on the rum bottles.
Plaza de la Catedral · Look at the facade and then look again: the two bell towers are different widths, and that is not damage or a later alteration. The baroque front was built asymmetrically on purpose, and the usual explanation is drainage — the narrower tower let rainwater run off the square side. Columbus’s remains were kept in this cathedral for about a century until Spain took them to Seville in 1898, when it lost the island.
Plaza Vieja · This square was a market, then a parade ground, and from the 1950s until 1996 it was a multi-storey car park — the whole centre of it was concrete. It was demolished and the square was rebuilt from photographs and plans. In the tower on the north-west corner there is a camera obscura, one of only a few working ones in the world, and from it you see the city live on a concave dish.
Plaza de San Francisco de Asís · This is the square the treasure fleet actually unloaded at — it opens straight onto the water, and the customs house and the merchants’ exchange are both on it. The eighteenth-century church was deconsecrated and is now used as a concert hall, because the acoustics of a stone basilica with no congregation in it turned out to be the best in the city. The fountain in the middle is from 1836 and is Carrara marble.
Calle Mercaderes · This street is the clearest demonstration of how the old city was saved, and the mechanism was financial. In 1994 the city historian was allowed to create a company that ran hotels, restaurants and shops in Habana Vieja and keep the hard currency it earned — and the condition was that the profits went back into restoration, including schools, clinics and housing, not only into more tourist buildings. Eleven small free museums sit along four blocks of this street as a result.

The Malecón and the sea wall of 1901

The Malecón was begun in 1901 during the American military occupation, and it was an engineering decision with a social result nobody planned: eight kilometres of wall at sitting height, facing north into the wind, with no commerce on it and nothing to pay for. It is where Havana goes in the evening — to talk, fish, court, drink, play music and watch the water come over the wall in a winter northerly. Walk it late in the afternoon; the sun is brutal until five and the sunset from here is the thing.

Castillo de la Punta · Finished in 1600 at the western side of the harbour mouth, and its job was one end of a chain. A heavy boom chain was stretched from here across to El Morro every night and raised to close the harbour, and any ship that tried to run it was fired on from both sides. The fort is small, usually empty and almost free, and the view from it is the whole mouth of the bay.
The Maine monument · In February 1898 the American battleship Maine exploded in this harbour and two hundred and sixty-six men died; the cause has never been settled and a 1976 American inquiry concluded it was most likely an internal coal bunker fire. The United States declared war on Spain anyway. The monument on the Malecón was built in 1925 with an American eagle on top; a crowd took the eagle down in January 1961 and the columns have stood empty since.
Paseo del Prado · Laid out in 1772 outside the city wall, which is the key to the shape of Havana: a wall ran along this line and the Prado was the promenade just beyond it. The wall was demolished from 1863 because the city had outgrown it, and the width of this avenue is the width of the ground the wall and its ditch occupied. The marble benches and the bronze lions are from a 1928 rebuild by a French landscape architect.
Capitolio Nacional · Finished in 1929, and it was built taller than the Capitol in Washington deliberately. Set into the floor under the centre of the dome is a twenty-four-carat diamond marking kilometre zero of the Central Highway, from which all distances in Cuba are measured; the stone is said to have come from the Russian crown jewels and was stolen in 1946 and returned anonymously to the president’s desk.
Hotel Nacional · Opened in 1930 on a hill over the Malecón, and two things happened in it. In December 1946 Lucky Luciano convened the leadership of the American mafia here for a week — the Havana Conference, held under cover of a Frank Sinatra engagement — to divide up the Cuban casinos. Sixteen years later the Cuban army dug trenches and gun positions in the hotel garden during the 1962 missile crisis, and the tunnel is still there and can be visited.
The Malecón at Vedado · Vedado is laid out on a grid with numbered and lettered streets, which no other part of Havana is, and the reason is the name: vedado means forbidden, and building here was prohibited from the sixteenth century so that the approach to the city could be kept clear of cover for an attacking force. When the ban was lifted in the 1860s the land was empty, so it was planned from scratch — and that is why the Malecón here runs past 1950s towers rather than colonial facades.

Vedado, the cemetery and the square

Vedado is the Havana most visitors never walk: a grid of 1920s mansions and 1950s towers on a slope, with the university at the top, the biggest cemetery in the Americas on one side and the square where the revolution speaks on the other. It is also where the cars make sense. There are roughly sixty thousand pre-1960 American cars still running in Cuba, and almost none of them have their original engine — the embargo from 1962 cut off parts, so they run on Soviet diesel blocks and whatever can be machined. Most of the shared-taxi routes run through here.

Universidad de La Habana · Founded in 1728 and moved to this hill in 1902, and the eighty-eight steps up to it are a political object in their own right: student movements have assembled on them since the 1920s, the 1957 attack on the presidential palace was organised from the campus, and until 1959 the university was legally autonomous ground that police could not enter. The Alma Mater statue at the top was cast in 1919 and the model was a thirteen-year-old girl.
Coppelia · An ice cream park, built in 1966 on Fidel Castro’s explicit instruction, and the brief was competitive: it was to serve more flavours than any American parlour. It opened with twenty-six and a capacity of more than a thousand people at once. There are two queues — one in convertible currency and one in Cuban pesos — and the peso queue is long, slow and the real one.
Cementerio de Colón · Fifty-six hectares and roughly a million burials, laid out in 1876 on a grid with streets and addresses like a city. It is one of the largest cemeteries in the Americas and there is a specific grave people queue at: La Milagrosa, a woman who died in childbirth in 1901, whose body was reportedly found intact when the tomb was opened and the infant in her arms. Visitors knock on the stone, ask, and walk away without turning their back.
Plaza de la Revolución · The square was designed and begun in the 1950s, before the revolution, under Batista — it was to be the Plaza Cívica. The Martí memorial and the ministry buildings round it are all pre-1959. What came after is the use: Castro addressed crowds of up to a million people here, and the Che portrait in steel on the Interior Ministry was only installed in 1993, thirty-four years after the revolution.
Callejón de Hamel · Two hundred metres of alley painted entirely by one artist, Salvador González Escalona, from 1990 onwards, and all of it is Afro-Cuban religious imagery — the orishas of Santería, which survived in Cuba by being mapped onto Catholic saints. On Sunday afternoons there is live rumba in the alley and it is not a performance for visitors; it is a neighbourhood event that visitors attend.
Fábrica de Arte Cubano · A disused cooking-oil factory that a Cuban musician reopened in 2014 as a single building holding galleries, a cinema, three bars, a concert stage and a shop. It is the clearest thing in Havana about what changed: it is not a state institution and not a private restaurant, but a hybrid that only became legally possible in the 2010s. It opens at eight in the evening, Thursday to Sunday, and the queue starts before that.

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Getting to Havana and getting around

José Martí International Airport · Eighteen kilometres south; there is no train and no airport bus, so agree the taxi fare before getting in
Estación Central · The 1912 railway station; trains still run east but slowly and unreliably, and tickets are bought in person
Muelle de Luz ferry · A two-peso ferry across the bay to Regla and Casablanca; it is a local service and it is the cheapest boat anywhere
The almendrones · The old American cars run fixed routes like buses for pesos; you flag them and say your destination
Avenida del Puerto · The cruise terminal and the harbour tunnel entrance; the tunnel opened in 1958 and still carries everything east
Playas del Este · Twenty-three kilometres east; a shared taxi or the seasonal bus, and this is where Havana swims

Cheap eats in Havana

Cuban food has to be understood through the rationing system before it makes sense. The libreta, the ration book, has existed since 1962 and still supplies a basic monthly quota to every household; everything beyond it is bought on an open market where supply is unpredictable, and that is why a menu here is a statement of intent rather than a list. Private restaurants — paladares — were legalised in 1993 and limited to twelve seats for years; they are now the best food in the country and the state restaurants mostly are not. Bring cash euros, and expect cards from American banks not to work.

The paladar · A private restaurant in someone’s home; legalised 1993, capped at twelve seats for years, and the best food here
Ropa vieja and moros y cristianos · Shredded beef in tomato, and black beans cooked with the rice; about eight dollars in a paladar
The daiquiri at Floridita · Frozen, with maraschino; the barman here put it in a blender in the 1930s and that is the version
The mojito at La Bodeguita · The famous Hemingway line about these two bars is almost certainly a later invention
Coppelia · The peso queue is the real one; it is slow and it is the most Cuban hour you will spend
Pan con lechón from a window · Roast pork in a bread roll from a doorway counter, in pesos; a dollar or less and it is the city’s lunch
Cafecito · Strong, sweet and tiny, from a hatch in a wall for a few pesos; the sugar goes in before the water
Havana Club and the rum museum · The brand is in a long legal dispute: the Bacardí family and the Cuban state both claim the name
Almacenes San José · The craft market in a dock warehouse; it is the one place to buy direct from makers and haggle
The libreta · The ration book, in force since 1962; the bodegas that fill it are on every block and are not shops

Museums in Havana

Havana has more museums per visitor than almost anywhere and they are almost all cheap, because they were built as public education rather than as attractions. The two to prioritise are the Cuban wing of the fine arts museum, which holds a national collection almost nobody outside the island has seen, and the city museum in the governors’ palace. A practical warning that applies across the city: opening hours are published and are not reliable, Mondays are closed almost everywhere, and the power goes off.

Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Cuban wing · Three floors of Cuban painting from the colonial period to now; almost none of it has ever left the island
Museo de la Ciudad · In the 1791 governors’ palace; the courtyard, the carriages and the throne made for a king who never came
Museo de la Revolución · In Batista’s own presidential palace; the bullet holes from the 1957 student assault were left in the walls
Memorial Granma · A pleasure yacht built for twelve that carried eighty-two men from Mexico in 1956; twelve survived the landing
Museo Napoleónico · Seven thousand objects collected by a sugar millionaire; one of the best Napoleonic collections outside France
Morro-Cabaña military park · Two fortresses in one ticket; the nine o’clock cannon is fired at La Cabaña every night in period uniform
Museo del Ron · A working scale model of a sugar mill and its railway; the sugar industry is the real subject
Casa de las Américas · Founded 1959 and it is why Latin American writers all knew each other; the literary prize is the oldest on the continent

Holy places in Havana

Cuba is officially secular and was officially atheist between 1962 and 1992, and what survived that period is instructive: the Catholic church lost most of its congregations and its schools, while Santería — the Afro-Cuban religion brought by enslaved Yoruba people — grew, because it had never needed buildings or clergy and had already spent three centuries practising in disguise. Both are visible now. The Catholic cathedral and the Santería houses are both open, and the second is not a tourist attraction and should not be photographed without asking.

Catedral de San Cristóbal · The asymmetrical towers are deliberate; Columbus’s remains were kept here until Spain took them in 1898
Callejón de Hamel · Two hundred metres of Santería imagery painted by one man; the Sunday rumba is a neighbourhood event
Regla · Across the bay by two-peso ferry; the church of the Virgin of Regla is also the house of Yemayá
Guanabacoa · The other centre of Afro-Cuban religion; the municipal museum there is specifically about it
Convento de Santa Clara · 1644, the oldest convent in Cuba, and the nuns lived in it enclosed for nearly three hundred years
Templo Beth Shalom · About fifteen thousand Jews lived in Cuba in 1950 and roughly a thousand remain
Iglesia de Paula · An eighteenth-century church that was part of a hospital; it is now a baroque music hall and the acoustics are why
Cementerio de Colón · The grave of La Milagrosa; visitors knock on the stone, ask, and leave without turning their back

Nature and day trips near Havana

Havana itself has very little green, and the honest answer is that the nature here is outside the city. Two things are within reach on a day: the beaches twenty kilometres east, which are white sand and warm water and genuinely good, and the limestone valley a hundred and fifty kilometres west where the tobacco grows. The practical constraints are real — hire cars are scarce and expensive, long-distance buses must be booked in advance, and a shared taxi negotiated the day before is usually the way it is actually done.

Playas del Este · Twenty-three kilometres east; nine kilometres of white sand with almost no hotels on it
Santa María del Mar · The best stretch of the eastern beaches; a shared taxi from Parque Central is the usual way
Valle de Viñales · A UNESCO site a hundred and fifty-three kilometres west; the mogotes are the remains of a collapsed cave roof
Jardín Botánico Nacional · Six hundred hectares seventeen kilometres south; too large to walk, and a tractor-train goes round it
Parque Almendares · The one real wood inside Havana, along the river; locals call it the Bosque and it is free
Quinta de los Molinos · A botanical garden in Vedado that was the Spanish governors’ summer house; small, shaded and cheap
Las Terrazas · Sixty-nine kilometres west in a biosphere reserve; a 1968 reforestation settlement with a river to swim in
Cojímar · A fishing village twelve kilometres east with a small fort; the sea here is the one in the novel

Things to do in Havana with kids

Havana with children is simpler than it looks and the reason is that the city is genuinely safe to walk — violent crime is very low and children are everywhere in the streets until late. What it does not have is purpose-built attractions, so the day is built from the free things: the ferry across the bay, the cannon at nine, the ice cream park, the camera obscura, and the sea wall. Two practical points: the heat between eleven and four is serious and the shade is scarce, and nappies, formula and specific medicines are hard to buy here, so bring them.

The bay ferry · A few pesos each way to Regla or Casablanca; a working commuter boat and a real boat ride
The nine o’clock cannon · Fired every night at La Cabaña by soldiers in eighteenth-century uniform; loud, short and free to hear
Camera obscura, Plaza Vieja · A live image of the city projected on a dish in a tower; one of only a handful working in the world
Coppelia · An ice cream park with a thousand seats; the queue is long and the children will not mind
Acuario Nacional · In Miramar; it is modest by international standards and it is the one indoor option in the heat
Fusterlandia · A whole neighbourhood covered in mosaic by one artist; children can climb most of it and it is free
Parque John Lennon · A shaded playground with a bronze Lennon on a bench; the guard who keeps his glasses will fit them for a photo
Playas del Este · Warm shallow water and white sand twenty-three kilometres east; the obvious answer to a hot afternoon

Nightlife in Havana

Live music in Havana is not an attraction, it is the economy of the evening: a state music venue, a hotel bar, a converted factory and a street corner all have bands, and the standard of playing is extraordinarily high because musicians are trained in free state conservatories. Two things to understand before you go out. The band passes a hat or sells a CD and that is most of what they earn, so carry small cash. And the night starts late — a Casa de la Música show at eleven is the normal one, and the earlier show is for tourists.

Fábrica de Arte Cubano · Opens at eight, Thursday to Sunday; galleries, a cinema and three bars in one building and one ticket
Casa de la Música, Miramar · The best salsa bands in the country, twice a night; the eleven o’clock show is the Cuban one
Callejón de Hamel on Sunday · Rumba from about midday; it is a neighbourhood event, free, and the musicians pass a hat
Tropicana · Open since 1939 and performed outdoors under the trees; expensive, and it has not been modernised
The Malecón at night · Free, loud and crowded until two; this is where most of Havana actually spends the evening
Floridita and Sloppy Joe’s · The two restored pre-revolution bars; expensive by local standards and the cocktails are correct

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Frequently asked questions about Havana

What is there to see in Havana?

The top sights in Havana are Plaza de la Catedral, Plaza de Armas and Palacio de los Capitanes Generales. The full list on this page has 10 sights, each with a photo and a short note.

How many days do you need in Havana?

Three to four days are enough to see the best of Havana without rushing, including at least one walking tour.

Is there a free walking tour in Havana?

Yes. sleepntrip has 3 free audio walks in Havana, with no guide and no group: your phone tells the story at every stop. The first one: The strongbox of an empire.

How do you get to Havana and get around?

The main ways are José Martí International Airport, Estación Central and Muelle de Luz ferry. Full details are in the transport section on this page.

Where to stay in Havana, and for how much?

sleepntrip shows only rooms in Havana that meet nine conditions: a good location, high guest scores, cleanliness, and a price of up to $80 a night for two. Pick your dates and see what is free.

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