Malecón, Havana

Where it sits. The Malecón — formally Avenida de Maceo — is Havana's sea wall and seafront boulevard, running roughly seven kilometres west from the mouth of the harbour, below the Castillo de San Salvador de la Punta, past the crumbling façades of Centro Habana to the tunnel under the Almendares river in Vedado. It faces due north into the Straits of Florida, with nothing between it and Key West but 150 kilometres of open water. The wall itself is low enough to sit on and wide enough to lie on, and that is essentially its function: it is the longest bench in the Caribbean. Behind it stand rows of early twentieth-century apartment buildings with columned arcades, painted in colours that the salt has been steadily removing for a century.

The story behind it. Construction began in 1901, during the United States occupation that followed the Spanish–American War, with an initial stretch running west from the Paseo del Prado. It was extended in phases over the following five decades, reaching Vedado in the 1950s, and it transformed a rocky, unusable shoreline into the city's principal public space. The buildings that went up behind it are a catalogue of the republican era: eclectic, art nouveau and art deco blocks, the Moorish-influenced Hotel Nacional of 1930 on its low bluff at the Vedado end, and the 1665 Torreón de San Lázaro, a stubby colonial watchtower now marooned in a traffic island. Salt spray and six decades of scarce building materials have taken a heavy toll, and collapses of seafront buildings are a recurring emergency.

On screen. The Malecón has been carrying Havana on film since long before the current wave. Carol Reed shot Our Man in Havana (1959) on location in the city weeks after Fidel Castro's forces entered it, capturing a Havana about to vanish. Mikhail Kalatozov's Soviet-Cuban Soy Cuba (1964) opened with a camera gliding along this seafront and produced some of the most audacious tracking shots in cinema history. Wim Wenders filmed the musicians of Buena Vista Social Club (1999) walking these blocks. And in 2016 the crew of The Fate of the Furious worked in Havana from 21 April to 5 May, staging a street race past the Capitolio and along the Malecón — the first Hollywood tentpole to film in Cuba after the diplomatic thaw. The counter-example is instructive: the Havana of The Godfather Part II (1974) was built in Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic, because filming in Cuba was impossible.

What you actually see today. In the evening the wall fills: teenagers with a portable speaker, fishermen working handlines and, further out, men floating on inflated inner tubes, couples, families with rum in plastic cups, trumpet players practising into the wind, and the pastel almendrones — Detroit sedans from the 1950s kept alive on improvised parts — cruising past. Winter nortes push swells over the wall and flood the boulevard, closing lanes and drenching anyone who has misjudged the sets. Landmarks along the route include the Hotel Nacional's terrace, the Antonio Maceo monument and its Parque, the Tribuna Antiimperialista built in 2000 beside the United States mission, and the neoclassical bulk of the Hotel Deauville and its neighbours in various stages of decay and restoration.

How to use it. The Malecón works as a spine for exploring rather than a destination on its own. From its eastern end you step straight into Habana Vieja and the four great colonial plazas — Vieja, Catedral, San Francisco and Armas — restored over decades under the city historian's office. Midway, the streets of Centro Habana lead inland to the Capitolio, the Gran Teatro and the Barrio Chino. At the western end lies Vedado, with the Hotel Nacional, the Rampa, the Necrópolis de Colón and the vast Plaza de la Revolución beyond. Walking the full length takes about ninety minutes without stops; a bicitaxi or a shared almendrón covers it faster.

Getting there and timing. Havana's José Martí airport is 20 kilometres south. The dry, cooler season from November to April is the most comfortable; the hurricane risk peaks between August and October, and summer heat and humidity are heavy. There is no charge and no gate. The pavement is broken in long stretches, with missing kerbs and open drains, which makes wheelchair travel hard despite the flat terrain. Bring cash — Cuba's payment systems rarely accommodate foreign cards — carry water, and be prepared for the wall's spray after dark, when the sea comes over without much warning.