Place
Hotel Tryp Habana Libre
Hotel Tryp Habana Libre, La Habana
Twenty-seven-story mid-century tower whose facade carries a monumental ceramic fruit mural, remade after the original crumbled.
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.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.