Cuba Guide
Trinidad and Sancti Spíritus
Museo Romántico
Address: Overlooking the plaza on the corner of Fernando Echerrí and Simón Bolívar
Opening time: Tues– Sun 9am–5pm
Price: $2CUC, extra $1CUC to take photos
The fabulous Museo Romántico is an essential part of the reliving-the-past experience of visiting Trinidad. With one of the country's finest and most valuable collections of furniture packed into its fourteen rooms, there is no better place to go for a picture of aristocratic lifestyle and tastes in colonial times. Dating from 1808, the house itself – built for the very wealthy Brunet family – is a magnificent example of elegantly unadorned nineteenth-century domestic Cuban architecture. Though the museum's contents have been gathered together from various buildings all over town, there is a wonderful consistency and completeness to the collection, befitting the perfectly preserved and restored rooms. Not a single piece looks out of place, from the precious eighteenth-century Viennese bureau, intricately decorated with pictures from Greek mythology, to the one-and-a-quarter-ton plain marble bathtub – although the armchair toilet stranded in the middle of a large and otherwise empty room does look somewhat comical. All the rooms are fantastically furnished, with two of the standouts being the exquisite dining room with its Italian marble floor and the master bedroom featuring a four-poster bed and French wardrobe, miraculously constructed without nails or screws.