Key West Is A Literary Pilgrimage For Fans of Hemingway

Above, one of the many cats at Hemingway House. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

Back in 2019, a friend and I took a cruise to Havana, Cuba. Along the way, the ship stopped for a day in Key West, Florida.

While there, I got off the shuttle bus to visit the Hemingway Home & Museum. I then took a self-guided tour of the former estate of Ernest Hemingway. There were many cats roaming around. They were descendants of a cat Hemingway had. 

Above, Ernest Hemingway's office. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

A piece of trivia: The Hemingway Home was featured in the 1989 Timothy Dalton James Bond movie, Licence To Kill.

AOL posted an article on why Key West is a literary pilgrimage for fans of Hemingway.

They begin it with:

Hemingway's influence in Key West is so strong that it would be difficult to avoid hearing about the writer while visiting the island. The house he lived in with his second wife, Pauline, is now the Hemingway Home and Museum. Hemingway fans travel from all over the world to visit the beautifully preserved property and get a glimpse into the novelist's private life. Besides bedrooms and family rooms, you can go into the writer’s studio, where he worked on masterpieces like "To Have and Have Not" and "For Whom the Bell Tolls." While the house is great, the best part about the museum is seeing the true owners of the property roam around their kingdom: the six-toed cats that are direct descendants of Hemingway's beloved Snowball.

To read more, go here.