Museum sights in Caribbean Islands
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Museum of Nevis History
The Museum of Nevis History occupies a Georgian-style building at the site where American statesman Alexander Hamilton was born in 1757 (the original home was toppled by an earthquake in the mid-1800s). This pleasant little museum has period photos with interpretive captions and other bits and pieces of Nevis culture and history.
The Nevis Historical and Conservation Society, custodians of this museum, also run the excellent Horatio Nelson Museum just south of Charlestown. It is home to the largest collection of the Admiral's treasures in the Americas and well worth a visit.
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Pirates of Nassau Museum
This world-class interactive museum offers walk-through entertainment, with realistic recreations of pirate life including a twilight quayside, replete with all the sounds of the era, and a cutaway of the pirate ship Revenge. You can sup at the Pirate's Bar, and there's a well-stocked gift store to plunder.
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Bahamas Historical Society Museum
The Bahamas Historical Society Museum has a modest miscellany of artifacts and documents tracing the islands' history from Lucayan times to the contemporary era. It's worth the admission merely to admire the beautiful model of the Spanish galleon Santa Luceno.
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Museo de la Lucha Clandestina
This gorgeous colonial-style building houses the Museo de la Lucha Clandestina, detailing the underground struggle against Batista in the 1950s. It’s a fascinating, if macabre, story enhanced by far-reaching views from the balcony.
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Bob Marley Museum
For many, Jamaica means reggae, and reggae means Bob Marley. If this sounds like you, a visit to Kingston definitely means a visit to the reggae superstar’s former home and studio. The creaky wooden house on Hope Rd where Marley once lived and recorded is the city’s most-visited site. Today the house functions as a tourist attraction, museum and shrine, but much remains as it was during Marley’s day. The house is guarded by a sentry of faithful Rasta brethren and sisters and shielded by a vibrantly painted wall festooned with Rastafarian murals. Dominating the forecourt is a gaily colored statue of the musical legend. Some of the guides are overly solemn (focusing with …
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Marshall's Pen Great House
This impressive stone-and-timber great house, built in 1795, stands among beautifully landscaped gardens on a former coffee plantation turned cattle-breeding property on the northwest side of town. The 120-hectare property is owned by Jamaica’s leading ornithologist, Robert Sutton, and Anne Sutton, an environmental scientist. Robert can trace his ancestry to the first child born to English parents in Jamaica in 1655. The Suttons’ home has wood-paneled rooms brimming with antiques, leather-bound books, artwork and many other museum-quality pieces. You can tour the mini-museum by appointment only. Marshall’s Pen is splendid for birding: more than 100 species have b…
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Trench Town Museum
Trench Town, which began life as a much-prized housing project erected by the British in the 1930s, is widely credited as the birthplace of ska, rocksteady and reggae music. The neighborhood has been immortalized in the gritty narratives of numerous reggae songs, not the least of which is Bob Marley’s No Woman No Cry, the poignant Trench Town anthem penned by Vincent ‘Tata’ Ford in a tiny bedroom at what is now the Trench Town Museum. In the days before superstardom, Bob and Rita Marley were frequent visitors and for a time even kept a small bedroom here. The museum is stocked with Wailers memorabilia, including Marley’s first guitar, some poignant photographs from …
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Museo de Arte de Ponce (Map)
With an expertly presented collection, this commanding art museum is the vibrant heart of the city’s artistic community, easily among the best fine-arts centers in the Caribbean and itself worth the trip from San Juan. Set across from Universidad Católica, about 10 blocks to the south of Plaza Las Delicias, the museum’s expertly curated collection – some 850 paintings, 800 sculptures and 500 prints – represents five centuries of Western art that was donated in large part by former governor Luis Ferré. While typical museum etiquette applies, the intimate spaces are loaded with works presented in a fully bilingual manner, and visitors can get up close and personal to take i…
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Museo de la Revolución
The Museo de la Revolución is housed in the former Presidential Palace, constructed between 1913 and 1920 and used by a string of cash-embezzling Cuban presidents, culminating in Fulgencio Batista. The world-famous Tiffany’s of New York decorated the interior, and the shimmering Salón de los Espejos (Room of Mirrors) was designed to resemble the room of the same name at the Palace of Versailles. In March 1957 the palace was the target of an unsuccessful assassination attempt against Batista led by revolutionary student leader José Antonio Echeverría. The museum itself descends chronologically from the top floor starting with Cuba’s pre-Columbian culture and extending to …
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Museo de las Casas Reales
One of the interesting museums, partly because of its history and the high quality of its exhibits, near Plaza España. Built in the Renaissance style during the 16th century, it was the longtime seat of Spanish authority for the entire Caribbean region, housing the Governor’s office and the powerful Audiencia Real (Royal Court), among others. It showcases colonial-period objects, including many treasures recovered from Spanish galleons that foundered in nearby waters. Several walls are covered with excellent maps of various voyages of European explorers and conquistadors. Each room has been restored according to its original style, and displays range from Taíno artifacts …
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Nine Mile Museum
The small community where the ‘King of Reggae’ was born on February 6, 1945, is set dramatically in the midst of the Cockpits. Despite its isolated location 60km south of Ocho Rios, the village of Nine Mile is decidedly on beaten path for pilgrimages to Bob Marley’s birth site and resting place. At the Nine Mile Museum, Rastafarian guides given to impromptu singing of Marley’s songs lead pilgrims to the hut – now festooned with devotional graffiti – where the reggae god spent his early years before moving to Kingston and where you’ll see the single bed he sang of in ‘Is This Love.’ Another highlight is the Rasta-colored ‘rock pillow’ on which lay his head when seeki…
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Museo–Casa Natal de Antonio Maceo
Two long blocks northwest of the church, Iglesia de Santo Tomás, is the important but little visited Museo–Casa Natal de Antonio Maceo where the mulato general and hero of both Wars of Independence was born on June 14, 1845. Known as the Bronze Titan in Cuba for his bravery in battle, Maceo was the definitive ‘man of action’ to Martí’s ‘man of ideas.’ In his 1878 Protest of Baraguá, he rejected any compromise with the colonial authorities and went into exile rather than sell out to the Spanish. Landing at Playa Duaba in 1895, he marched his army as far west as Pinar del Río before being killed in action near Havana in 1896. This simple museum exhibits highl…
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Museo de la Música Puertorriqueña
This spacious pink villa designed by Juan Bertoli Calderoni, father of Puerto Rico’s neoclassical style, offers Ponce’s best museum experience, and is a must for those interested in the sound of the island. A guided tour of the museum showcases the development of Puerto Rico’s music, allowing hands-on demonstrations of the island’s indigenous instruments. The collection of Taíno, African and Spanish instruments – especially the handcrafted four-string guitar-like cuatros and three-sting trios – and careful explanation of Puerto Rican musical traditions are highlights. The museum also hosts a three-week seminar on drum building in July, and holds traditional con…
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Museo Hemingway
The villa’s interior has remained unchanged since the day Hemingway left (there are lots of stuffed trophies), and the wooded estate is now the Museo Hemingway. Hemingway left his house and its contents to the ‘Cuban people, ’ and his house has recently been the stimulus for a rare show of US-Cuban cooperation. In 2002 the Cubans agreed to a US-funded project to digitalize the documents stored in the basement of Finca La Vigía, and in May 2006 Cuba sent 11,000 of Hemingway’s private documents to the JFK Presidential Library in America for digitalization. This literary treasure trove (including a previously unseen epilogue for For Whom the Bell Tolls ) was finally…
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Taíno Ceremonial Site
This Taíno ceremonial site, off Hwy 111, is not dramatic in the sense of having monumental ruins. The power of the place comes from its first-rate setting in a natural botanical garden of ceiba, ausubo and tabonuco trees shading the mid-slopes of the Central Mountains. There are also 10 ceremonial bateyes (Taíno ball courts), which date back about 800 years to the time of the original Taíno inhabitants. Stone monoliths line many of the courts; some weigh up to a ton, but most are small. One court measures 60ft by 120ft. Quite a few have petroglyphs, such as the famous Mujer de Caguana, who squats in the pose of the traditional ‘earth mother’ fertility symbol.
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Musée de la Pagerie
This former sugar estate was the birthplace of Marie Joseph Rose Tascher de la Pagerie, the future Empress Josephine. A picturesque stone building, formerly the family kitchen, has been turned into a museum containing Josephine's childhood bed and other memorabilia. Other buildings contain such things as the Bonaparte family chart, old sugarcane equipment and love letters to Josephine from Napoleon.
Multilingual interpreters relate anecdotal tidbits about Josephine's life, such as the doctoring of the marriage certificate to make Josephine, six years Napoleon's elder, appear to be the same age as her spouse. You can poke around in the ruins of the old mill directly opposi…
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Museo Histórico Municipal
The showpiece museum here is the grandiose Museo Histórico Municipal, just off Plaza Mayor, housed in a mansion that belonged to the Borrell family from 1827 to 1830. Later the building passed to a German planter named Kanter or Cantero, and it’s still called Casa Cantero. Reputedly Dr Justo Cantero acquired vast sugar estates by poisoning an old slave trader and marrying his widow, who also suffered an untimely death. Cantero’s ill-gotten wealth is well displayed in the stylish neoclassical decoration of the rooms. The view of Trinidad from the top of the tower alone is worth the price of admission. Visit before 11am, when the tour buses start rolling in.
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Palacio de Gobierno Y Vagón Mambí
This eclectic palace on Calle Oficios was the former seat of the Cuban government from 1902 until 1929 (when the Capitolio was completed). Furnished with decorative baroque details and an Italian marble floor, the museum contains a parliament room, the former president’s office and the original Cuban flag used by Carlos Manuel de Céspedes. To the side of the building on Churruca is the Vagón Mambí, a train car built in the US in 1900 and brought to Cuba in 1912. Put into service as the presidential car, it’s a palace on wheels, with a formal dining room, louvered wooden windows and, back in its heyday, fans that cooled the car with dry ice.
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Fundación Naturaleza y El Hombre
The fascinating museum at the Fundación Naturaleza y El Hombre displays artifacts from the 17,422km canoe trip from the Amazon source to sea led by Cuban intellectual and anthropologist Antonio Nuñez Jiménez in 1987. Other exhibits in the truly astounding museum include one of Cuba’s largest photography collections, books written by the prolific Nuñez Jiménez, the famous Fidel portrait by Guayasamín stalactites, and ‘the glass house’ – glass cases containing all kinds of intriguing ephemera from the founder’s life. The museum is a foundation and one of Havana’s most rewarding.
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People’s Museum of Crafts & Technology
On the west side of Parade Square is the porticoed Georgian redbrick facade of the ruins of the Old King’s House, a once-grandiose building erected in 1762 as the official residence of Jamaica’s governors. The building was destroyed by fire in 1925, leaving only the restored facade. Today the stables, to the rear, house the People’s Museum of Crafts & Technology. A reconstructed smith’s shop and an eclectic array of artifacts – from Indian corn grinders to coffee-making machinery – provide an entry point to early Jamaican culture. A model shows how Old King’s House once looked.
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Museo Carlos Finlay
Named after Cuba’s most famous scientist, this engaging museum on Calle Cuba is also home to the Academia de Ciencias Médicas, Físicas y Naturales (Academy of Medical, Physical & Natural Sciences). A physician of French and Scottish descent, Finlay (1833–1915) was the first scientist to identify the mosquito as the organism that caused yellow fever. Later on he became Cuba’s chief medical officer and a respected figure within the Latin American scientific community. The museum displays numerous busts and paintings related to the scientist’s remarkable life, along with a stash of over 95,000 medical books.
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Maritime Museum
The marvelous Maritime Museum stands in the courtyard and contains a miscellany of things nautical from the heyday of the Royal Navy, plus a fabulous model of the Jamaica Producer cargo ship. Nelson lived in the small 'cockpit' while stationed here, and his quarters are replicated. Also of interest is a platform known as Nelson's Quarterdeck.
It was here that the young Horatio Nelson was said to keep watch for enemy ships, and once you climb to the top you'll agree that it does offer a splendid vantage point. A plaque on the wall of the King's Battery, to the right of the main entrance of the museum, commemorates his time here.
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Museo de la Ciudad
Since 1968 Palacio de los Capitanes Generales has been home to the Museo de la Ciudad, one of Havana’s most comprehensive and interesting museums that wraps its way regally around a splendid central courtyard adorned with a white marble statue of Christopher Columbus (1862). Artifacts include period furniture, military uniforms and old-fashioned 19th-century horse carriages, while old photos vividly re- create events from Havana’s rich history such as the 1898 sinking of US battleship Maine in the harbor. It’s better to body-swerve the pushy attendants and wander around at your own pace.
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San Francisco de Asís
Perhaps the most recognizable building in Trinidad is the quaint yellow bell-tower of the former convent of San Francisco de Asís. Since 1986 the building has housed the Museo Nacional de la Lucha Contra Bandidos (tel:4121, open from 09:00 to 18:00 Tuesday to Sunday).
The displays are mostly photos, maps, weapons and other objects relating to the struggle against the various counterrevolutionary bands that operated in Sierra del Escambray between 1960 and 1965. The fuselage of a US U-2 spy plane shot down over Cuba is also on display. Here, too, you can climb the tower for good views. It's on the corner of Piro Guinart.
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Museo Alcázar de Colón
Designed in the Gothic-Mudéjar transitional style, the Museo Alcázar de Colón was used as a residence by Columbus’ son, Diego, and his wife, Doña María de Toledo, during the early 16th century. Recalled to Spain in 1523, the couple left the home to relatives who occupied the handsome building for the next hundred years. It was subsequently allowed to deteriorate, then was used as a prison and a warehouse, before it was finally abandoned. By 1775 it was a vandalized shell of its former self and served as the unofficial city dump. Less than a hundred years later, only two of its walls remained at right angles.
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