Museo de Artes Decorativas
French-style mansion whose walls once hid a countess's sealed fortune in jewelry and art.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Museo de Artes Decorativas in Havana centers on Maria Luisa Gomez Mena, Countess of Revilla de Camargo, who built this French-style Vedado mansion in the 1920s and once hosted the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. It follows her through the 1959 revolution, when she believed her world would hold, and then fled the island rather than lose it. Listen for what workers found behind a plastered basement wall the day this mansion reopened as a museum.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Napoleon Museum
Florentine-style mansion holding thousands of Napoleonic relics collected by an exiled sugar baron.
Casa de la obra Pia
Baroque colonial mansion whose orphan-dowry endowment named the street, now a working embroiderers' guild.
Miramar
Grand seaside district of nineteen-twenties mansions, now split between embassies and garden paladares serving Cuban home cooking.
Museo de Arte Colonial. Casa de Don Luis Chacón
Governor's eighteenth-century mansion with a shaded courtyard and a room of colored-glass fanlights.
Finca Vigía
Hilltop hacienda kept exactly as its writer-owner left it, typewriter, trophies and fishing boat still in place.
Fototeca de Cuba
Colonial mansion holding Cuba's national photo archive, with rotating galleries of vintage and new work.