Old Havana (La Habana Vieja)

History

Havana was founded in 1519 on Cuba’s south coast and moved to its present position on the north coast under Governor Hernando de Soto, becoming the island’s capital in 1553 once the exceptional shelter of its bay was recognised. From 1561 the Spanish crown required its transatlantic treasure fleet, the Flota de Indias, to assemble in Havana before the crossing to Spain, and the city’s population swelled each year with the sailors, merchants and officials of the combined convoy. The wealth this trade generated financed the district’s fortifications, churches, plazas and finest private houses, and made Havana the most heavily defended city in the Spanish Americas.

That defence was tested in 1762, when a British fleet besieged and captured Havana during the Seven Years’ War. British forces held the city for eleven months before returning it to Spain in exchange for Florida under the Treaty of Paris. The episode exposed the weakness of Havana’s fortifications and prompted Spain to build the Fortaleza de San Carlos de la Cabaña, the largest fort constructed in the Americas.

The explosion of the USS Maine in Havana harbour in 1898 provided the pretext for the Spanish-American War, after which Cuba gained formal independence. The following decades, especially the Prohibition era of the 1920s and 1930s, made Old Havana a fashionable destination for American visitors, and bars and hotels such as the Bodeguita del Medio, La Floridita and the Hotel Ambos Mundos, where Hemingway wrote part of For Whom the Bell Tolls, became well known. After the 1959 Revolution and the US trade embargo that followed, private redevelopment of the old city effectively stopped, and the resulting neglect, paradoxically, preserved the colonial fabric that the OHCH later restored.