History related to Hotel Ambos Mundos
The Hotel Ambos Mundos, solid and square construction of five floors, of eclectic style of principles of the XX century, was rised in the place that occupied an old homestead of the XVIII and XIX centuries, previously demolished.
At the moment the address of the Hotel Ambos Mundos is: Obispo street and Mercaderes. But for that time the Obispo street handed over for different names because the corresponding time.
Hardly initiate the new XX century and established the Republic many streets of Havana lose their old and traditional names, when being substituted by Cuban patriots' names, foreign personalities or nations friends. Changes that to say of the Historian of the City, Emilio Roig de Leuchsering, was carried out of capricious way and without consulting.
The Obispo street would not be the exception. March 27 of 1905 to the proposal of the councilman Franciso Piñeiro, the City council of Havana in an unanimous way agrees to substitute the name of Obispo street, by that of Pi and Margall, in honor to the tribune and Spanish republican that so many sympathies demonstrated for the Cause Cuban Pro-Independence.
Although formally the new denomination would be effective for something more than three decades, the oral tradition continued calling it for its family name: Obispo. The definitive change would not arrive until the 1936, when Municipal Alcalde Guillermo Belt achieves by means of the Ordinance-law number 511, and in accordance with Emilio Roig's report, to restore the old, traditional and popular names of the Havanan old streets. This way it is adopted, like official name, its primitive denomination Obispo street, which arrives until our days.
Hotel Ambos Mundos, finished in 1923, reformed and enlarged in 1924 and 1930 enjoys of connoted international prestige to have welcomed among their walls during a period of relatively long time - from 1932 at 1939 - to the North-American novelist, Nobel Prize of Literature Ernest Hemingway who was habitual guest of the room 511, the one which at the present time is conserved as museum.
The Hotel Ambos Mundos was restored in the year 1996 by the company Habaguanex S. To (Office of the Historian), current landlady of this property, conserving its colonial style, characteristic of the place where it is located, in the middle of center of Old Havana.
