Gran Hotel Manzana Kempinski La Habana
Historical shopping arcade in Havana, Cuba
The Gran Hotel Manzana Kempinski La Habana is a luxury hotel in Havana, Cuba. It is located in the historic Manzana de Gómez building, an early-20th-century building that was Cuba's first shopping mall. The Kempinski Hotel chain, belongs to the oldest hotel groups in Europe, Kempinski Aktiengesellschaft.
History
Don Julián de Zulueta initially built the building up to the first floor dedicated to commercial shops. There was a large basement the architect took advantage of part of the city wall's moats and foundations which were prepared to receive several more floors. In 1873 it was the first commercial complex in Havana to resemble those in European cities built within the city walls of Havana Vieja on the Calzada de Monte between Prado and Zulueta. It was a modest set of 12 porticoed commercial establishments of a single floor united by a common front.
The building on a plot bounded by Calles Neptuno, San Rafael, Monserrate y Zulueta was designed by the architect Don Pedro Tomé y Veracruisse, construction began in 1890. While the building was still unfinished, Don Julián de Zuluetawas sold it to Andrés Gómez Mena who came to Cuba from Spain and completed the first floor. Designed around interior passageways that ensured natural light and ventilation, four floors were added from 1916 to 1918.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Gran Hotel Manzana Kempinski La Habana” as historical shopping arcade in Havana, Cuba. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as historical shopping arcade in Havana, Cuba. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6753419. Authority coordinates are 23.138, -82.358. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1873, 1890, 1916 and 1918.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gran Hotel Manzana Kempinski La Habana” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.