Miramar
Grand seaside district of nineteen-twenties mansions, now split between embassies and garden paladares serving Cuban home cooking.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Havana's Miramar district starts with a 1994 decree and works backward to the sugar barons and tobacco magnates who built its Beaux-Arts and Art Deco mansions along Fifth Avenue in the 1920s and 1930s, only to lose them almost overnight after the revolution. It follows the neighborhood through decades as an elegant ghost of embassies and shuttered facades, then to the Special Period famine that forced Cuba to legalize home cooking for cash, and to Lilliam, one of the first Habaneras to open her mansion's garden to paying diners. Walk the street today and you'll pass an embassy gate on one side, a paladar's menu board on the other, both behind the same iron gates.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
La Guarida
Faded mansion apartment turned celebrated paladar, reached by a wrought-iron staircase past neighbors' laundry lines.
Museo de Artes Decorativas
French-style mansion whose walls once hid a countess's sealed fortune in jewelry and art.
Old Havana
Colonial walled quarter of cobbled plazas and restored baroque mansions, funded back into repair by its own tourist trade.
Napoleon Museum
Florentine-style mansion holding thousands of Napoleonic relics collected by an exiled sugar baron.
Hotel Nacional de Cuba
Grand marble hotel raised fast for the elite, later a trade school for peasants.
Asociación Cultural Yoruba de Cuba
Government-donated Prado mansion turned shrine and museum to the Yoruba orishas, funded partly by tourist admission.