Where to stay in Havana: the 4 neighborhoods to know in 2026

The old town fits in a rectangle of one kilometer by two, between the harbor and the Prado, and it has two faces one street apart: the blocks restored over thirty years by the City Historian's Office, with their repainted facades, their museums and their terraces, and the blocks next door, where balconies are held up by props and laundry dries on the columns. The four squares make the route: Plaza de Armas and its booksellers under the ficus trees, Plaza de la Catedral and its baroque facade that seems to ripple, Plaza de San Francisco facing the cruise terminal, and Plaza Vieja, the finest, with its stained glass, its brewery and its children playing ball until nightfall. Between them, Obispo street, pedestrian and packed from morning to evening, where you hear "¿de dónde eres, amigo?" ten times before reaching the first square: this is where the restaurant touts, the sellers of "factory" cigars and the fake guides gather. You stay here to do everything on foot, for the casas in colonial houses with high ceilings and iron balconies, and for the empty squares in the early morning, before the groups. The downside: soliciting at every corner until evening, and state hotels whose name is worth more than the room.

Prices are inflated tenfold for them, and touts are constantly on your back trying to pull off scams.

Jean Luc

Between the old town and the Vedado, the Prado runs down from the Capitol to the sea under its laurels, lined with marble benches and eight bronze lions, and this is where the city set its palaces: around Parque Central, where men have been arguing baseball out loud on the same corner for fifty years, the hotels of 1875 and 1930 have been joined by two five-stars with rooftop pools, facing the Gran Teatro and the restored Capitol, whose dome tops the one in Washington by a few meters, and Habaneros are attached to that. In front of the hotels, the American cars of the fifties, repainted pink and turquoise, wait for customers for the city tour by the hour. Behind, Centro Habana, the densest neighborhood in the city, its treeless streets, its weary buildings, the Barrio Chino and its two streets of restaurants, the Callejón de Hamel and its Sunday-noon rumba. And the Malecón, eight kilometers of seawall along the water, where the whole city comes to sit at sunset, with a bottle and a guitar, and where the waves come over the top on days of north wind. You stay here for the grand hotels with pools and generators, for the theater and the Capitol on the doorstep, and for the wall at dusk. The downside: the most insistent touts in the city around Parque Central, and Centro Habana streets without lighting as soon as you leave the Prado.

Twenty minutes from the old town, the Vedado is the city of the 1950s, laid out in a grid of lettered and numbered streets, planted with flame trees and colonnaded villas, many of which have become casas and private restaurants. La Rampa, 23rd street climbing up from the sea, is its main artery: the Yara cinema, the ice cream of Coppelia under its concrete saucer, where Habaneros queue for an hour for three scoops, the former Hilton of 1958 that became the Habana Libre, and, on its bluff facing the Malecón, the Hotel Nacional, the 1930 palace where the American mob held its conference in 1946 and whose garden, peacocks and cannons are open to anyone who buys a drink. Further on, the university steps, the FOCSA tower of 1956, the Plaza de la Revolución and its two iron faces on the ministries, the Colón cemetery and its marbles, and the Fábrica de Arte Cubano, the former oil mill that became the place where the city goes out from Thursday to Sunday, exhibitions, concerts and bars on three floors. You stay here to live at the Habaneros' scale, for the private restaurants in villas, for the concerts, and because nobody offers cigars to passers-by. The downside: a taxi or a thirty-minute walk to the old town, and broken sidewalks you learn by heart.

On the other side of the tunnel under the Almendares, the city changes scale: Miramar is a grid of 1940s villas under the flame trees, where the Quinta Avenida, as wide as a motorway and planted down its middle with a garden, lines up the embassies, the offices of foreign companies and some of the best private restaurants in the city, in houses with gardens. There is nothing to visit, and that is what you come for: the silence, the unbroken sidewalks, the business hotels with pool, gym and generator, the Club Habana, the former yacht club of 1928 whose beach is rented by the day, the aquarium and its dolphins for the children. Further west, in Jaimanitas, Fusterlandia, the whole neighborhood that an artist has been covering with mosaics for thirty years, the neighbors' houses included, and the Marina Hemingway. You stay here for the quiet, for families, for business, and for a night without a blackout. The downside: twenty to thirty minutes by taxi for everything, no street life in the evening, and state hotels whose scores range from one to double.