In the Finca Vigía(farm), an extension of nine hectares on a hill located in San Miguel del Padrón municipality to the east of Havana, Hemingway lived from 1940 to 1960 and there he received numerous friends, as the actors Gary Cooper, Esther Williams, and Ingrid Bergman or the bullfighting Dominguín and Ordóñez.
There he conceived several of his most diffused plays and the cozy enclosure remains stays just as he left it when he undertook the last trip to United States, when his health was getting weaker in a hopeless way.
Nowadays, this house is a true museum of one of the most famous North American writers, full with unique features of his personality, lifestyle and last years. It seems to be that sooner or later the writer will passed through the door to check his incomplete writings.
The Museum was inaugurated in 1962, in commemoration to the first anniversary of the writer's death and the sixty- third of his birthday. One year after, the widow of Hemingway, Mary Welsh, returned to Cuba to donate to the country the entire property (without making any change) and the personal objects of the God of Brass of the North American literature, fulfilling in this way his husband's will,.
The Hemingway Museum is a perfect reflection of the customs and likes of the novelist and a summary of the so call Cuban period of his life.
The enclosure stores thousands of documents and among them we can find a rejected epilogue of his book "For Whom Bells Tolls?", 3 000 pictures and negatives without revealing and letters from Adriana Ivanchich, the 19 year-old Italian Countess of whom Hemingway fell deeply in love.
The scholarly persons of his work have special interest in the collection of 9 000 books that rest in disseminated shelves even in the bathroom, many of these books have notes in the margins and those notes can help to know him better.
The museum ‘Hemingway’ is an attractive place for any visitor in the Island, mainly for those who admire the excellent author's work.
