Architectural, Cultural sights in Caribbean Islands
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Devon House
This restored home nestles in landscaped grounds on the northwest side of Hope Rd at its junction with Waterloo Rd. A beautiful ochre-and-white house, it was built in 1881 by George Stiebel, a Jamaican wheelwright who hit paydirt in the gold mines of Venezuela. The millionaire rose to become the first black custos of St Andrew. The government bought and restored the building in 1967 to house the National Gallery of Jamaica, which has since moved to its present location downtown. Antique lovers will enjoy the visit, whose highlights include some very ornate porcelain chandeliers. Note the trompe l’oeil of palms in the entrance foyer. Stiebel even incorporated a game room…
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Sunbury Plantation House
Built between 1660 and 1670, the handsome Sunbury Plantation House was painstakingly restored after a 1995 fire. The house has 2ft-thick (60cm) walls built of local coral blocks and ballast stones, the latter from the ships that set sail from England to pick up Barbadian sugar.
The interior retains its plantation-era ambience and is furnished in antiques, many made from Barbadian mahogany. In the area behind the house is a collection of horse-drawn carriages. Tours are given by guides well versed in local history. Have lunch or tea at the Courtyard restaurant, or a five-course dinner served on Sunbury's 200-year-old mahogany dining table.
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Government House
This conch-pink Georgian structure atop Mt Fitzwilliam is the official residence of the Bahamas' governor-general. Visitors can walk the grounds, but for a close look at the building you'll need permission and accompaniment from the guards. Twice a month, you can take tea with the governor-general's wife or watch the changing of the guard.
The site has been in government hands since 1799 although governors lived there prior to that time. The original home was built in 1737 by Governor Fitzwilliam (1733-38). A new structure was built in 1806. Additional wings were added during the 20th century, but the entire house was destroyed by a hurricane in 1929. The current building…
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Casa Blanca
First constructed in 1521 as a residence for Puerto Rico’s pioneering governor, Juan Ponce de León (who died before he could move in), the Casa Blanca is the oldest continuously occupied house in the western hemisphere. For the first 250 years after its construction it served as the ancestral home for the de León family. In 1779 it was taken over by the Spanish military, then with the change of Puerto Rico’s political status in 1898, it provided a base for US military commanders until 1966. Today it is a historic monument containing a museum, secluded grounds, a chain of fountains and an Alhambra-style courtyard. The interior rooms are decked out with artifacts from…
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Halse Hall
This is a handsome great house, on the B12, 5km south of May Pen, situated up on a hillock with commanding views. After the English invasion in 1655, the land was granted to Major Thomas Halse, who built the house on an old Spanish foundation and whose grave is behind the house in a small cemetery. For a time the house was occupied by Sir Hans Sloane, the famous doctor and botanist, whose collection of Jamaican flora and fauna formed the nucleus of what later became the Natural History Museum in London. Today, it is owned by the bauxite concern, Alcoa Minerals, which uses it for conferences and social functions. To take a tour call and ask for Mrs Chambers.
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Centro Cultural Angel R Ortiz
Centro Cultural Angel R Ortiz is a small museum maintained by the Puerto Rican Institute of Culture. The building was once part of a network of 27 such huts that housed so-called ‘road keepers’ (in this case, convicts). The lodge stands on the old ‘pick and shovel’ road built by slaves of Spanish landowners and later maintained by black convicts over the centuries. In the last years of Spanish colonization, decadent criollo landowners of Aibonito used to boast that the government had killed all of the town’s people of African descent by forcing them to build the road. Phone ahead for reservations.
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La Casita
Looking like a yellow gatehouse, La Casita greets visitors near the cruise ship docks in 'lower' Old San Juan, in the outskirts of the walled city that rises on the hill to the north. The Department of Agriculture & Commerce built this miniature neoclassical structure with its red-tiled roof in 1937 to serve the needs of the burgeoning port. Today, La Casita is the information center for the PRTC.
Stop here for maps, and to check out the weekend craft market. Also look for the food vendors selling icy piraguas (delicious snow cones) or taste the local coffee at the old-fashioned hexagonal stand.
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Pedro St. James Castle
This imposing Caribbean great house dates from 1780, making it the oldest building in the Caymans, and it's been everything from a jail to a courthouse to parliament before recent refurbishments turned it into a museum. The Castle is touted as the islands' 'birthplace of democracy': in 1831 the decision was made here to vote for elected representatives.
Just as momentously, this is the place that the Slavery Abolition Act was read in 1835. It now houses a museum featuring a multimedia presentation evoking 18th century Cayman and the grounds showcase native flora.
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Folly
Thes two-story, 60-room mansion known as the Folly on the peninsula east of East Harbour was built entirely of concrete in pseudo-Grecian style by a North American millionaire. It was in private use until 1936, when the roof collapsed. Sea water had been used in the construction, causing the iron reinforcing rods to rust. Today the shell of the structure remains, held aloft by limestone columns.
It makes a perfectly peculiar locale for a picnic. Nearby stands the bright-orange Folly Point Lighthouse, built in 1888.
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Casa de Lola Rodríguez de Tió House
Built in 1843 in a neoclassical criollo style and said to be an excellent example of local 17th-century domestic architecture, this house is said to be the most continually occupied residence in the town. Its most famous resident was a 19th-century poet and patriot named Lola Rodríguez de Tió, who was exiled in the 1860s for her revolutionary activities. Lola’s mother was a descendant of Ponce de León. The house is supposed to act as a museum, but is often closed. Phone ahead.
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House
Once the residence of a political reformer and Puerto Rico’s first representative to the Spanish court, this restored 18th-century house is now the headquarters of the Conservation Trust of Puerto Rico. The house contains limited exhibits of Taíno artifacts along with a small gift shop, and highlights the precarious nature of much of the island’s ecology. The staff can be helpful with information about visiting the trust’s other island properties.
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Town House
The Town House, with a handsome redbrick frontage buried under a cascade of bougainvillea and laburnum, dates from 1765, when it was the home of a wealthy merchant. It has since served as a church manse and later as a townhouse for the mistress of the Earl of Hereford, Governor of Jamaica. In the years that followed it was used as a hotel, warehouse, Masonic lodge, lawyer’s office and synagogue. Its current incarnation is a clothes store.
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Museo Casa Cautiño
This museum was built as a criollo-style town house in 1887 to house the wealthy Cautiño family, who profited from a typical trio of cane, cattle and tobacco. Almost 100 years later, the government claimed the property for back taxes (a common event on the island, which has saved many heirlooms). Now the house has been restored to its dignified Victorian state, with Oriental carpets and period furnishings.
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Castillo Villa del Mar
Castillo Villa del Mar is a Victorian mansion that's on the National Registry of Historic Places (despite the dilapidation and the graffiti) and was once home to a restaurant and art gallery where local painters showed their work. These days it's a run-down old eyesore, but the mansion next to it has been somewhat restored, giving rise to hopes that both structures will eventually be returned to their former state of grace.
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La Casona
The beguiling yellow and blue Spanish-colonial building that dominates the north side of Plaza Francisco Mariano Quiñones is La Casona, a mid-19th-century townhouse that was once the meeting place for an elite San Germán social group known as the Círculo de Recreo. In more recent times it has served as a cultural center and a shop. At the time of research it was undergoing refurbishments.
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Museum
This museum honors the memory of this legendary Puerto Rican figure, and it also serves as a venue for concerts and experimental theater. Call for events, and visit if you want to find out more about the pretty astounding political career of Luis Muñoz Marín. Also take a minute to check out the great vegetation and expansive grounds. Look for the house on the east side of Río Piedras.
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Giddy House
A small brick hut, the Giddy House (so known because it produces a sense of disorientation to people who enter), sits alone amid scrub-covered, wind-blown sand 100m to the southwest of Fort Charles. The redbrick structure was built in 1888 to house the artillery store. The 1907 earthquake, however, briefly turned the spit to quicksand and one end of the building sank, leaving the store at a lopsided angle.
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Casa de Los Condes de Jaruco
With its wide gallery, this house is said to be typical of aristocratic residences built around 1737. Although the house is named after the counts of Jaruco, its most famous resident was María Mercedes de Santa Cruz y Cárdenas, who was born in the mansion and went on to become one of the city’s early literary greats. Today the building houses La Casona Centro de Arte.
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Rose Hall Great House
The infamy of multiple-murderer Annie Palmer, AKA 'White Witch of Rose Hall' surrounds this imposing 18th-century house and its inhabitants. Though destroyed by slaves in 1831, it was restored to its haughty three-storey grandeur in 1966. Besides discovering the thrilling legend, an abode full of antiques, mahogany and silk awaits you - as do an old English-style pub, snack bar and gift shop.
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Barnett Estate
The sea of sugarcane south of Montego Bay is part of the Barnett Estate, a plantation owned and operated since 1755 by the Kerr-Jarretts, one of Jamaica’s preeminent families; their holdings once included most of the Montego Bay area. Today the family (now in its 11th generation) holds the land in trust for the government and manages it accordingly.
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King’s House
King’s House was initially the home of the Lord Bishop of Jamaica. The original house was badly damaged in the 1907 earthquake. Today’s visitors explore the remake, built in 1909 to a new design in reinforced concrete. The dining room contains two particularly impressive full-length portraits of King George III and Queen Charlotte by Sir Joshua Reynolds.
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Bellfield Great House
The Bellfield Great House, built in 1735, has been restored and is now a showcase of 18th-century colonial living. The former plantation manager’s house doubles as a museum charting the development of the area since the day that Colonel Nicholas Jarrett arrived with Cromwell’s invasion army in 1655.
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Jamaica House
About half a kilometer further up Hope Rd from Devon House on the left, Jamaica House is faced by a columned portico and fronted by expansive lawns. Initially built in 1960 as the residence of the prime minister, the building today houses the prime minister's office. Visitors are restricted to peering through the fence.
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Whitehall Great House
The only other site of note in the hills is Whitehall Great House, in ruins following a fire in 1985. The surrounding plantation grounds provide a stage for horseback rides. Don't be fooled into paying around US$5 for a tour by the locals who hang out and attempt to attach themselves as self-ascribed 'guides.'
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Casa Museo Luis Muñoz Rivera
This house honors the so-called grandfather of Puerto Rico’s autonomy movement and the 20th-century architect of the Puerto Rican commonwealth. This is where Luis Muñoz Rivera was born in 1859, and it contains a collection of furniture, letters, photographs and other memorabilia.
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