Centro Habana
Dense grid of nineteenth-century tenements and faded department-store facades along a once-grand shopping boulevard.
This guide to Centro Habana walks the boulevard at Galiano and Neptuno, once home to La Época, the department store Diego Alonso and his brother Angel built up from a small fabric shop bought in nineteen twenty-seven into Havana's third-largest retailer by mid-century, employing more than four hundred people. You'll hear about the crowds who walked these blocks from morning to midnight to see the lit windows, and what happened to Alonso's family business in the upheaval of nineteen sixty. The guide follows what he did next, and what the same name came to mean an ocean away. Stand at that corner and look up at the five floors of windows still holding his original design.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.