It was built in 1924 on a site that previously had been occupied by an old family house on the corner of Calle Obispo and Mercaderes (Bishop and Merchants Streets) in Old Havana.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the Spanish retailer Antolín Blanco Arias bought a family house on the site, from his office colleague Manuel Llerandi y Tomé.

This hotel since has gained international note from its most famous long-time tenant: in 1932 a room on the upper (5th) floor became the “first home” in Cuba of writer Ernest Hemingway, who enjoyed the views of Old Havana, and the harbor in which he fished frequently in his yacht Pilar.

Hemingway rented the room for $1.50 per night ($1.75 for double occupancy) until mid-1939, when he transferred his winter residence from Key West (a U.S. island 90 miles from Cuba) to a house in the hills near Havana, Finca Vigia, which he shared with Martha Gellhorn (they were married in 1940).

Hemingway began his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, a novel of the Spanish Civil War which he had witnessed over the previous several years, in the room in the Ambos Mundos, on 1 March 1939.