Special places archive

Hemingway’s house

This story published in The Guardian (Bell tolls for Hemingway treasures as Cuban house caught in sanctions trap, by Conor Clarke and Ewan MacAskill) includes an audio slideshow: a tour of Hemingway’s house.

Finca Vigia, or Lookout Farm, 10 miles east of Havana, is the place Ernest Hemingway called home from 1939 to 1960, and it is there that the author’s abundant tastes, in literature and in life, are on display. Visitors can see where Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea, where he dined with Errol Flynn and where Ava Gardner was reported to have skinnydipped…

…For the past two years, a group of American organisations has been working to restore the battered house and save the manuscripts and books. But US sanctions against Cuba have hindered the group’s attempts to collaborate with the Cuban government. The Bush administration’s response has been mixed, flitting between acquiescence and obstruction.