CubaPLUS Magazine

As one of the most seductive components due to its beauty of the Great Metropolitan Park of Havana, the Jardines de la Tropical celebrate 119 years with intact popularity among the capital's residents and visitors to the city, as a center of entertainment: Cuban music, family offers and life to the beat of nature.

After concluding a program that restored its shine in 2019, the obligatory impasse of the pandemic came, but now it welcomes everyone with pleasant offers that tend to come alive in the middle of the Havana summers, which are always memorable. The truth is thJardines de la Tropical in Havana is to mention generally happy events. And everyone likes to remember that they were founded by Don Cosme Blanco, director of the first brewery, "La Tropical", as a recreational enclave to market and advertise the refreshing product, always in the preference of parishioners.

1904 was the year designated as its opening, when the Ensueño, La Cúpula, Tropical, Templo Indio halls began to provide services, as well as the so-called picnic areas, located on the banks of the emblematic Almendares River, sheltered by the coolness of the green vegetation of the surrounding wooded area, an eden. A whole complex intended for fun, which did not always take sufficient care of conservation and non-contamination of the natural environment, something usual in those times.

The fame of the delicious place spread like wildfire and the crowded pilgrimages that brought together many peninsular emigrants there such as Galicians, Basques, Canaries, Asturians, Andalusians, Sevillians and Granadians, who recalled customs and musical airs of their land in lucid revelries, were very popular.

But around 1940, with the rise of Cuban popular music, it began to influence and bid for its entry to that most particular site to date. Then these Gardens began to give free rein to the dance halls of the Ensueño and Mamoncillo Halls, where outstanding orchestras and great figures of national culture performed, which made the clients of those wild places shudder and enjoy themselves in another way.

There they played with delight for partygoers Arcaño and his Maravillas, Cheo Belén, Sonora Matancera, Pérez Prado, Melodías del 40, Joseíto Valdés, Félix Chapotín and others who marked a glorious era of dance and music in Cuba.

The present of the Jardines de la Tropical is no less striking, since it is equipped with new gastronomic and recreational facilities, a children's games area, and an amusement park. The traditional dances of the Ensueño and Mamoncillo halls continue at full speed, where, with special performances by sones groups and even a variety of world music has been heard near or in those parts. Prodigious Gardens of the Tropical.