Finca Vigía (Lookout Farm) is the house Ernest Hemingway lived in from 1939 until the revolution — a white Spanish colonial farmhouse on a hill in the San Francisco de Paula municipality, about 15 kilometres southeast of central Havana. He wrote "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and "The Old Man and the Sea" here, kept a boat in the harbour, and raised a menagerie of cats, dogs, and fighting cocks on the property.
The house is preserved exactly as he left it, which is what makes it remarkable: the books are still on the shelves (around 9,000 volumes, many annotated), the mounted animal heads are on the walls, the bottles are on the bar, and the cats — his descendants — still roam the grounds. Visitors are not permitted to enter the house directly, instead looking in through the open windows and doors, which gives the whole experience an appropriate voyeurism. The swimming pool where Ava Gardner once swam is in the garden. Take a taxi from Havana as public transport connections are indirect.