Hotel Ambos Mundos
This hotel, built in the 1920s, recently reopened after a long restoration. It is conveniently located around the corner from La Bodeguita, Ernest Hemingway's 'little shop in the middle of the street,' and a 10-minute wobble from El Floridita. Off and on throughout the 1930s, Hemingway laid his head in Room 511, where the plot of For Whom The Bell Tolls formed in his mind. After the Revolution, the hotel was turned into a hostelry for employees of the Ministry of Education across the way. Hemingway's room—'a gloomy room, 16 square meters, with a double bed made of ordinary wood, two night tables and a writing table with a chair,' recalled Colombian author and Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez—was preserved, however, down to an old Spanish edition of Don Quixote on the night table (entrance US$1). You can easily identify his top-story room when gazing up from street level. The hotel was once painted white; although rose-pink today, the exterior walls of Hemingway's room have been left white to commemorate his presence.
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on Aug 24, 2002
