Church of the Holy Guardian Angel
Neo-Gothic parish church where a stolen baptismal page and a botched art theft both vanished without a trace.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Church of the Holy Guardian Angel in Havana opens on a night sometime in the nineteen eighties, when thieves pulled three colonial-era paintings by Nicolas de la Escalera off these walls and rolled them into a barrel to smuggle them out. It then reaches back further, to a baptismal ledger where a page once recorded a boy christened here on the twelfth of February, eighteen fifty-three, who grew up to be Jose Marti, and who tore that page out was never identified. A few pages over, the entry for another son of this parish, the priest Felix Varela, still survives, faded but legible.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Iglesia y Convento de la Merced
Baroque temple whose gilded altars and frescoed vaults were painted by a rotating circle of nineteenth-century Cuban artists.
Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary
Baroque cathedral with uneven bell towers, built of coral stone flecked with ancient sea fossils.
Iglesia del Espiritu Santo
Coral-stone colonial chapel raised by free Black parishioners, hiding centuries-old burial vaults beneath its floor.
Church of Jesus of Miramar
Domed Romanesque-Byzantine church with murals painted over years and Cuba's largest pipe organ.
Oratorio de San Felipe Neri
Former colonial church turned bank vault, now a domed concert hall prized for its acoustics.
Convento de Santa Clara
Colonial-era cloister with one of Latin America's largest timber roofs and Havana's oldest public fountain.