Finca Vigia

To me, the best weather in the world is found when you go toward the equator until it gets too hot, and then you go straight up until you find cool breezes.  I learned this years ago when I passed a couple of weeks in Cuernavaca taking Spanish lessons.  Cuernavaca calls itself the city of eternal spring, and that's a pretty accurate description.  Even though it's squarely in the Earth's tropical zone, 6000 feet of elevation assures that Cuernavacans don't need air conditioning.

I have a friend, Lilian, who sited her home halfway up a mountain in the suburbs of San Jose, Costa Rica.  Weather there stays close to perfect due to a happy combination of latitude and elevation.  One night, while visiting there, we all decided to go to a restaurant near the mountain top.  I foolishly neglected to take a sweater along, and shivered through dinner, proving on that mountain you can be either too high or too low.

In 1939, Ernest Hemingway brought his third wife, Martha Gelhorn, to live with him in Cuba.  After settling in, Martha began to look for a permanent home. She must have known that in a hot place like Havana it would be a good idea to be as high up as you can get because after a search, she set her sights on a large finca situated on many acres on top of the highest hill on Havana's southern horizon.  It was in a little town called San Francisco de Paula, and Papa Hemingway agreed with Martha to make it their home.

Finca Vigia (literally, "farm with a view") is home to hundreds of species of tropical trees and plants surrounding a one-story, expansive home with huge rooms.  Soon after the purchase, new bookshelves in the house filled with books and the notes of Papa, who read even more than he wrote.  Papa's fourth wife, Mary, built him a four story tower with a writing studio on the top floor.  From that room you can see all of the metropolitan area of Havana and beyond out into the Florida Straits.  Papa felt the tower studio was too silent for him to write well and resumed writing standing at his typewriter in the house.  Even on the ground floor, one could see the Havana panorama laid out in the distance.

Many animal rights proponents would sneer at Hemingway, the hunter.  He hung heads of buffalo, gazelles, and antelope he had killed on safari on the finca walls, sometimes several in a room.  Yet the finca abounded with pet cats and dogs.  Papa would mourn the deaths of any of his dogs, and he was said to be even fonder of his cats than his dogs.  He established a little cemetery for some of the dogs.  Descendants of his dogs and cats still live on the finca grounds, fed and cared for by the attendants of the property, now a nationally protected museum.  Cuba has restored Finca Vigia to the showplace it must have been when Papa lived there.  No expense was spared in the restoration, and every item was cataloged, removed, stored, and eventually put back in the same place when it was necessary to construct a new roof for the house a few years ago.

Papa, I loved your writing, hated your hunting, marveled at your Cuban home, and snapped a photo of your little pet cemetery.

Les Inglis