Next comes Amargua Street, or the Bitter Way. It is along Amargura that certain pious and penitent monks were said to practice flagellation. With shoulders bent, and on their knees, they invited the blows of whips while wending their way out towards the edge of the city. Incidentally they collected alms en route. On the southeast corner of Amargura and Mercaderes Streets a peculiar cross in stucco, painted green, is built into the wall of the house where, centuries ago, lived a high dignitary of the church, before which all passing religious processions paused for special prayers.
There is hardly a square within the old walled city that has not some story or legend whose origin goes back to the days of Velasquez, De Soto, Cortez of Mexico, and other celebrated conquerors of the New World.
The Havana of today is a strange mingling of modern, reinforced cement and stone structures, five or six stories high, with little one or two-story, thick-walled, tile roofed samples of architecture that prevailed three hundred years or more ago. City property, however, is increasing so rapidly in value that many old landmarks along the narrow streets of the wall inclosed section are being torn down and replaced with large, well equipped office buildings.
COLON PARK
Colon Park, one of the most beautiful pleasure grounds of the Cuban capital, is also known as the Campo de Marte, and is at the southern end of the famous Prado. It is noted for its marvellous avenues of royal palms. From it the Call de la Reina, once one of the most fashionable streets of the city but now given up to business, runs westward toward the Botanical Gardens.
With the accumulation of sugar estates, coffee plantations, cattle ranches and resultant wealth, people of means began to seek summer homes beyond the walls of the old City. All men in those days went heavily armed for any danger that might threaten, while numerous slaves furnished protection from common thieves and highwaymen.
With the development of the outlying districts, trails and roads soon began to reach out both to the west and south, followed some years later by what were known as Caminos Reales or Royal Roads, connecting Havana with Matanzas, Santa Clara, Cienfuegos, Trinidad, Sancti Spiritus, Remedios, Camaguey and Santiago de Cuba.
One road, known still as El Cerro, ran southwest along the crest of a ridge that led towards the western part of the Island and in after years connected Havana with the big coffee plantations in the mountains and foothills of Pinar del Rio. Along this road were built the first suburban residences and country homes of the aristocracy of Havana.
Many of these places were cut out of dense woods, and on one of them, until less than ten years ago, the original owner, the Conde de Fernandina, retained a full square of dense primeval forest, not a tree of which had been removed since the days of Columbus. This remnant of virgin wilderness, located on the corner of El Cerro and Consejero Arango Streets, was for some six years passed by the electric car line of El Cerro.