Havana Map 1855 City Plan - Havana, Habana Vieja, El Morro

This detailed plan of Havana was published in 1855 by Bernardo May as part of the Album Pintoresco de la Isla de Cuba, a picturesque album of Cuban views issued by B. May y Compania and printed in Berlin by the firm of Storch & Kramer. Unlike the decorative, view-filled engravings typical of picturesque albums of this kind, this particular sheet takes a deliberately restrained, practical approach, presenting Havana's street grid with sequential house numbers rather than the pictorial embellishment a tourist-facing publication might otherwise favor. That choice of style reflects the map's underlying purpose: it was made to be used, not merely admired, a working reference plan of a major colonial capital rather than a scenic souvenir.

Streets are laid out and numbered systematically across the plan, reflecting the organized approach Spanish colonial administrators took to urban planning in Havana during this period, while the city's fortifications are marked prominently, underscoring Havana's standing as one of the most heavily defended ports in the Spanish Caribbean. Public institutions including churches and hospitals are also plotted across the plan, giving a clear sense of the civic infrastructure that supported one of the wealthiest colonial cities in the hemisphere by the mid-1850s. The map's unembellished, grid-focused presentation stands in deliberate contrast to the picturesque views that filled the rest of the album it was published in, suggesting May intended this particular sheet to serve visitors and residents alike as an actual navigational tool. Together the numbered streets, fortifications and public buildings make this one of the more genuinely functional city plans of Havana to survive from the period.

This plan is an excellent choice for anyone with family history in Havana or a fondness for detailed nineteenth-century city cartography, and it stands apart from the broader island-wide Cuba maps found elsewhere in this collection by zooming in on the capital alone, street by street. Where those other sheets show Cuba's provinces, ports and railroads at a national scale, this 1855 May plan is the only city-level view of Havana in the group, offering a granular look at the capital that the wider regional maps simply cannot match. It is offered unframed in a full range of sizes to suit any wall.