35 Best things to see & do in Havana

Americans poured into capitalist Cuba in the 50s bringing with them the latest consumer goods and beautifully finned cars.

Going for a spin in a classic, chrome-festooned gelato-coloured Chevy, Dodge or Ford – preferably a convertible – is one of the highlights of any trip to Havana.

Tourists are not permitted to drive classic cars themselves; instead, Gran Car’s vintage vehicles are dotted throughout the city, often outside the big hotels, and easily recognisable as the vehicles in the best condition on the streets.

Havana’s rich, eclectic architectural fabric spans 500 years of Spanish Colonial, American and Independence buildings.

The Old City, a UNESCO-listed World Heritage Site, offers up a feast of eye-catching Spanish colonial buildings – plazas, churches, mansions and civic buildings – all hallmarked with Andalucian decorative flourishes. The rest of the city, much of it neglected and crumbling, boasts an equally fascinating mix of art deco, art nouveau, modernist and colonial wonders.

This sizzling, sparkling floorshow is one of Havana’s most iconic experiences. Cuban dancers, flamboyant in exotic costumes of feathers and sequins, perform exquisitely choreographed dances to a razzle of great music and lighting on a vast open-air stage.

Running since 1939, and once the world’s most famous nightclub, today it’s still a must-see on any Havana visit, and worth every penny of the expensive (for Cuba) entrance fee.

Winston Churchill puffed on Romeo y Julieta, Che Guevara on Montecristo, and Fidel Castro’s favourite smoke was a Cohiba.

Cuban cigars are famous around the world. There’s a reason: it’s the combination of a perfect blend of tobacco plant terroir in southwestern Cuba, the climate, and the 200 artisanal processes that crafts a cigar from its tiny beginnings as a pinhead-sized tobacco seed to luxury smoke.

There are around 40 cigar factories in Cuba, with Partagas – one of the biggest – offering tours on weekday mornings.  This is a unique chance to see the cigar-making process in one of the very few Havana factories open to the public.

Known as ‘Havana’s sofa’, the Malecon, an 8km stretch of sea wall on Havana’s waterfront, is where lovers, friends, musicians, swimmers and fishermen crowd before dusk to enjoy the cooler hours.

Swing your legs over the wall with a bottle of rum, or just lean against the wall with your back to the sea to chat to locals and enjoy the stunning light on the architectural line-up that curves around the Atlantic-facing sea road.

In the last 10 years, Cuba’s art scene has exploded across Havana, with state-run galleries and private art spaces emerging to showcase exciting and challenging contemporary art. New photography galleries have also opened their doors in a city buzzing with creativity.

The place to go for Cuba’s best art is the Cuban section of Havana’s Museum of Fine Arts, which exhibits a rich body of work, spanning more than 400 years of works. Cuba’s most famous artist, Wilfredo Lam, working mid-century and considered a Cuban Picasso, has sold works for vast sums at auction. Tomas Sanchez’s dreamlike landscape paintings are mesmerising, and fetch high prices.

Cuba doesn’t have a domestic art market as such, so artists rely on international tourism and in particular the popular Havana Biennial (Bienal de la Habana) art fair.

The best way to experience Cuban cuisine, international dishes, and hospitality is to eat at a paladar – a private restaurant run by Cuban entrepreneurs. Hundreds of such private restaurants (paladares) have opened in the last 2 decades years across Havana.

Initially restricted to mom-and-pop outfits – in private homes and limited to only 12 chairs, a recent relaxation of the rules has seen these small-scale restaurants expand to fill entire homes (e.g. Otra Manera) or open in dedicated venues.

On the menu you’ll now find simple and elaborate seafood dishes, ropa vieja (shredded beef or pork and veg in a tomato-based sauce), roasted suckling pig, Cuba-made goats’ cheese, chicken Kiev (in the one Russian paladar) and Chinese dumplings (made by a Tianjin chef).

Havana brims with artistic talent, and while several artists have studios in Old Havana, most of the more well-known and emerging artists have studios squirrelled away all over the city.

Sussette Martínez Montero (sussem@gmail.com), a long-time Havana art curator, has extensive contacts in the Cuban arts world and access to studios others cannot reach. She offers fully customisable half-day, full-day and up to four-day insider art tours that take visitors to the private studios of Cuba’s top painters, photographers, sculptors and installation artists.

A Havana highlight, they offer the chance to meet the artists at work, and learn about their methods, inspirations and techniques.

The magical neo-baroque Grand Theatre on Central Park, decorated in muses and angels, houses Havana’s most magnificent theatre.

Come for the variety of performances including ballet by Cuban National Ballet dancers; modern performance by Carlos Acosta’s new Acosta Danza troupe, and contemporary moves by Danza Contemporánea de Cuba.

Tours of the building are available, too, giving access to the gorgeous marble staircase and upper floors.

This Havana landmark – a huge, vanilla-hued confection looming above the sea – is the city’s most storied building. From its opening in 1930, it has hosted Olympians, presidents, Hollywood stars and mots notoriously perhaps, the Mob. Johnny ‘Tarzan’ Weissmuller dived into the Nacional pool from his room, and the Mob dined on roast flamingo during their 1946 Mafia conference.

The hotel has a unique and extraordinary history, and offers excellent daily guided tours. These fascinating tours divulge the gossip on the famous guest list, delve down into tunnels buried in the gardens dug by the government during the tense days of the 1962 Missile Crisis, and end in the ‘Hall of Fame’ – a room decorated with hundreds of photos of famous guests on the walls.

Invigorating, percussion-driven and sexually charged rumba, a dance rooted in the Congo and slave history, developed in the late 19th century in Havana and is still widely performed.

A number of live venues across Havana offer rumba sessions: the most colourful is in the open-air mural-covered Hamel alley; the most varied is at El Palenque where other musical varieties are also performed. The least touristy is at the crowded El Jelengue de Areito.

American novelist Ernest Hemingway lived at this hilltop farm just outside Havana for 20 years. His fishing boat, library, books, writing tower, clothes, pet graves and his now empty pool are preserved for fans of his life and literature.

Cuba’s most impressive museum, housed in two separate buildings almost next to each other, showcases the best of Cuban art (in one building) from the 1600s to the modern day, and international artists over 5 art-filled floors of a second building.

The Vinales Valley, a UNESCO-protected limestone landscape celebrated for its ancient tobacco cultivation techniques, sits at the western end of the magnificent Sierra de los Organos mountain range. The mini forest-cloaked limestone haystack mountains, known as mogotes, stud the ruddy red floor of a valley ploughed by oxen and patterned by tobacco fields.

Tobacco leaf-drying huts and thatched huts (bohíos) complete the unique, timeless sculpted landscape.

Cuba’s best tobacco terroir is south of Viñales at San Juan y Martínez. Tour the Hector Luis Prieto (Quemado de Rubí) plantation and watch a roller (torcedor) craft cigars.

An insightful primer on Cuba’s sugar cane and rum-making in a grand 18th-century mansion, with gorgeous stained-glass windows. Tour highlights include the working model and train of the erstwhile Cuban Hershey sugar plantation, a whiff of the base ingredient of rum – molasses – and a tasting session in the museum bar.

This lively month-long celebration of Cuban and Latin American art takes over Havana’s streets, plazas and galleries.

For the visitor, it offers a unique insight into contemporary art and culture in Cuba, and it’s an exciting time to be in the capital with a myriad of parties, openings, and concerts.

Highlights in previous years have included vast installation work that reflects on and critiques Cuba’s 1959 Revolution. Visiting international artists also take part.

Havana’s Museo de Artes Decorativas is housed in a palatial mansion, built in the 1920s in Regency style, overflowing with 33,000 antiques from Tiffany glassware to Italian marble. The treasures belonged to Countess Maria Luisa Gomez Mena, sister to famous sugar king, Jose Gomez-Mena Vila, who lived here after it was built.

In the decades spanning the 16th and 18th centuries, Cuba’s Spanish rulers built a series of imposing forts to repel rampaging buccaneers from raiding the Spanish treasure fleets in the Bay of Havana, and to fence out the English. Five hundred years on, these muscular fortresses still dominate Havana’s harbour, and have come to symbolise the city – they even appear on the city’s coat of arms.

El Morro Castle, and its lighthouse, is the most iconic and the city’s emblem. This impressive stone and coral fort, complete with cannons, defended the eastern headland of Havana Bay from pirate attacks until the end of the 18th century, when the British captured the city.

The fortress houses a display on the Italian engineers and builders of the castle. You can also climb the 19th-century lighthouse for a view of the city and Malecón.

This imposing wedding-cake mansion is the seat of the Cuban government. Stop by to see the marble 400ft Hall of the Lost Steps, the gigantic Statue of the Republic, the bronze bas-relief front doors, and the statue of the devil in a patio devoid of shade.

Dating from the 19th century, Havana’s remarkable cemetery is an architectural gem, home to marble mausoleums, winged angels, sparkling mosaics, wrought-iron motifs, Art Deco sculptures, vast government monuments and 1959 Revolution memorials.

The vast Plaza de la Revolucion is the site of May Day rallies, Papal masses, and propaganda gatherings. It’s famous for the tall memorial to José Martí, hero of Cuban independence, and the huge black iron silhouetted portraits of Che Guevara, and 1959 Revolution leader Camilo Cienfuegos pinned to government offices.

The largest collection of Napoleonic memorabilia outside of Europe (some 5,000 items) is housed in this glorious Florentine mansion. Go for the paintings, statues, prized bronze death mask, the French emperor’s bicorne hat, his pistols, and the original oil Napoleon Planning his Coronation by Jean-Georges Vibert.

History buffs will love the Museo de la Revolución that details the minutiae of Fidel Castro’s 1953-1959 rebel campaign, culminating in victorious revolution in the ornate surrounds of the old Presidential Palace. The outdoor exhibition displays weaponry, aeroplanes and the Granma yacht, which brought Castro from exile in Mexico to Cuba to relaunch the rebel campaign in 1956.

This handsome, columned former palace of the Spanish Captains-General, which dominates the Plaza de Armas, exhibits the treasures of the Spanish empire in grand Cuban baroque surrounds. Artifacts include paintings, flags, furniture, weaponry and antiques. A bathroom with marble baths shaped as shells, and the throne room are highlights.

This twin-towered 18th-century masterpiece of Cuban Baroque, with beautiful undulating facade and mismatched bell towers, dominates Old Havana’s main plaza. Peek inside: the altar is made of Carrara marble and Italian frescoes crown the altar recess.

Legendary American writer Ernest Hemingway downed a record 16 daiquiris in one sitting at this, his favourite Havana bar. The bartender mixed him a sugarless and double rum tipple and named it the Papa Doble. Come early to bag a barstool at the glamorous scarlet bar.

An exquisitely preserved mid-19th-century pharmacy with wooden interiors, marble counters, dazzling stained glass windows, art nouveau accents, and dozens of ceramic jars all beautifully labelled with the names of lotions and potions.

Fun souvenir art for tourists is available at this one-stop art and crafts market, housed in a converted warehouse on the edge of Old Havana.

This funky, Cuban-run cafe and coffee roastery in Old Havana is a popular stop. It sells arguably Havana’s best coffee, great breakfast and exceptional sourdough sandwiches including ample vegan and vegetarian options.

One of Havana’s longest established art galleries showcasing Cuban avant-garde art and international artists.

In a year-long creative project, the Jaimanitas neighbourhood has been carpeted in colourful ceramic tiles by artist Jose Fuster. Look for painted plants, birds, animals and political figures amid this extraordinary artistic project. The pièce de résistance is the artist’s own house – a fairytale adventure in brilliant colours.

Built by the Spanish in 1763, this 700m-long defence is the largest fort in the New World; the colossal stone castle dominates the eastern flank of Havana harbour, south of El Morro castle. A visit is worth it for the views alone – a lovely panoramic vista of Old Havana.

The smart, cannon-peppered grounds are also home to a fascinating Che Guevara Museum and a weaponry museum. Allow an extra hour or two to visit them.

At 9pm each night a cannon guard of honour ceremony (cañonazo) is held at the fort, with a cast dressed in 18th-century uniform.

An emerging district of street art, galleries and festivals in Southern Old Havana. Look out for cool street art, Galería Taller Gorría, and new bars and cafés.

A respected Old Havana gallery inside a converted paper factory, exhibiting must-see exhibitions of Cuban contemporary art.

The Fábrica de Arte Cubano is a creative powerhouse of art, photography, music and dance. All the hot stuff is inside this converted peanut oil factory with food and drinks to fuel the night. Uber popular.