Old Town Square

This guide to Plaza Vieja in Havana starts with an odd sight: a twelve-foot metal fence locked around the square's colonial marble fountain, not to protect an antique but to ration water in a neighborhood whose pipes had rotted through. It traces the fountain back to seventeen ninety-six, when the square was still called Plaza Nueva, through floggings, bullfights and a market so busy the plaza took its name, to president Gerardo Machado tearing the fountain out in the nineteen thirties to build an underground parking garage in its place.