Hotel Tryp Habana Libre
Twenty-seven-story mid-century tower whose facade carries a monumental ceramic fruit mural, remade after the original crumbled.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Hotel Tryp Habana Libre in Havana starts with millions of tiny glass tiles once covering the facade above you, and the years when pedestrians learned to watch the sky for falling pieces. It traces The Cuban Fruits, the largest mural the painter Amelia Peláez ever made, designed in 1957 for the brand-new Habana Hilton and fabricated far away in Italy using a mosaic method nobody had tested against a Havana summer. The hotel was renamed Habana Libre after 1959, and Peláez herself died in 1968, long before the story of her facade was finished.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Fusterlandia
Fantastical fishing-village lanes where every wall, bench, and rooftop wears broken-tile mosaic.
National Art School
Womb-shaped brick domes and vaulted courtyards built on a seized country club's golf course.
Hotel Nacional de Cuba
Grand marble hotel raised fast for the elite, later a trade school for peasants.
Edificio Bacardi
Glazed terracotta art deco tower crowned by a bronze bat, once home to a Prohibition-era rum bar.
Vedado
Grid of tree-lined streets angled to catch the sea breeze, home to a landmark concrete tower once ranked among the world's tallest.
Christ of Havana
Towering marble figure of Christ atop a harbor hill, hand-carved from sixty-seven Carrara blocks.