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| A history that you must know |
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| San Cristóbal of Havana, funded on 1515, developed around the present ´Plaza de Armas´(Square of Weapons). Step by step sprayed to all directions, in spite of the attacks performed by the enemies of Spain, and in order to defend the city from the pirates and corsairs was built at first a castle, ´Castillo de la Real Fuerza´(Royal Force Castle), and then the Morro and the Punta. Due to the importance that the city had acquired, in 1667 it was surrounded of a wall that extended from the present park of Máximo Gómez to the immediacies of the Central Station of the Railroads. |
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| The city kept growing and filled completely the inside part of the wall and then the constructions outside of it started. At the beginning of the XIX century the outside part was almost another city itself. The little towns of Peñalver, San Nicolás, Chávez, La Punta, Monserrate and Dragones joined the first neighborhoods in the outside part of the wall at the end of the XVIII around the Field of Mars (at present Park of the Fraternity), supported by the cities´s regulations of 1818 that use to rule the straight layout of streets. A year later the first steam ship in Latin Americ would begin its services. |
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| Havana possesses an important port in the bay that carries its name, the one that during the colonial domination served as scale between Spain and many other countries, That´s why it was called the key of the New World. From the sixteen century to nineteen century, Havana was best known by the splendor of its port, the richest one of America, whose commercial function also adquired militar characteristics later. The history of Havana is the one of a nation arisen of the convergence of the cultures and the races, that create a new culture and an original space by a process of changes, addition and mixture. During four centuries another space was born ,from the colonial city, beyond the walls, to the old city that today ups to its four hundred eighty-five years. |
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| This way, the center was displacing from the port to the zone that today occup the Paseo del Prado , the ´Parque Central´(Central Park) and the ´Parque de la Fraternidad´(Park of Fraternity), surpassing the walls that already were militarily obsolets and they would begin to be demolished in 1863. This zone of widening continued enlarging in population during the second half of the XIX century, besides a true urban alluvium of innovations was produced, as the public lighting by gas (1848), the public transportation by animal traccion (1862), the telephone service (1881), with the antecedent of its invention in Havana by the Italian Antonio Meucci; and the electric lighting, in 1890 |
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