Finca Vigía (Hemingway House)

Finca Vigía / Museo Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway's mountain villa in Cuba, where he lived for 20 years and wrote The Old Man and the Sea. Books, hunting trophies, and his yacht Pilar are preserved just as they were.

Finca Vigía sits on a hill in the town of San Francisco de Paula, about 15 km southeast of Havana. In 1939, Hemingway and his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, rented the property, later bought it, and lived there until he left Cuba in 1960. He wrote parts of For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea here. The latter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and helped him win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He donated his Nobel medal to the Virgin of Charity of Cobre. After Hemingway died in 1961, his widow donated the house to the Cuban government, and it became a museum with the interior kept as it was: about 9,000 books, the antelope and buffalo heads he hunted in Africa, a typewriter (he preferred to write standing up), records, bullfighting posters on the walls, and even his weight figures penciled on the bathroom wall. To protect the artifacts, visitors cannot enter the house. Instead, they can look inside through the open doors and windows from outside, so a telephoto lens or binoculars is recommended. You can climb the white lookout tower beside the house and visit the garden, which holds the swimming pool, the graves of his four beloved dogs, and the fishing boat Pilar, displayed under a wooden shed. Admission is a few dollars (check locally), and photography may cost extra. Getting there: a taxi from Old Havana takes about 30 minutes. It can be combined with Cojímar, the fishing village that inspired The Old Man and the Sea and has a Hemingway bust, for a half-day trip.

Finca Vigía (Hemingway House)

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