Manzana de Gomez

This guide to the Manzana de Gómez in Havana opens with the 1917 shooting of sugar baron Andrés Gómez Mena, gunned down on a Havana street by a Catalan watchmaker named Fernando Reugart just as his masterpiece neared completion. It traces how Gómez Mena built Cuba's first city block devoted purely to shops, with covered galleries, crossing diagonal arcades and elevators, and the roughly twenty five thousand people who once passed through it daily. Look up at the ironwork and glass canopy still arching overhead as you walk through the arcade.