Explore Key West

The Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum at 907 Whitehead Street in Key West is a stone house of 1851 where the writer lived with Pauline Pfeiffer from 1931 to 1939. Here he wrote works including To Have and Have Not. Rooms keep his furniture and writing studio, and dozens of cats, many of them six-toed, live in the garden.

The Key West Lighthouse on Whitehead Street replaced a tower destroyed by the 1846 hurricane and first shone in 1848; it was raised by 20 feet in 1894 and decommissioned in 1969. The Key West Art and Historical Society runs it as a museum: visitors climb 88 steps to the top and see the keepers' quarters with their belongings.

The Audubon House on Whitehead Street was built in the 1840s for harbour pilot and wrecker John Geiger, and is named after John James Audubon, who visited Key West in 1832 to draw local birds. The restored house shows 19th-century furniture and a collection of Audubon's first-edition bird prints, set in a tropical garden.

The Mel Fisher Maritime Museum at 200 Greene Street in Key West is a non-profit museum of shipwreck archaeology. It shows objects recovered from 17th-century wrecks such as the Spanish galleons Nuestra Señora de Atocha and Santa Margarita, and from the slave ship Henrietta Marie, and offers tours of its conservation lab.

The Key West Shipwreck Treasure Museum on Mallory Square tells the story of the wreckers who salvaged ships on the Florida Keys reef. Set in a re-created 19th-century wrecker's warehouse, it combines actors, films and objects from the Isaac Allerton, which sank in 1856, and visitors can climb a 65-foot lookout tower.

The Harry S. Truman Little White House in Key West's Truman Annex was built in 1890 as officers' quarters at the naval station. President Truman spent 175 days here over 11 working winter visits between 1946 and 1952. The house is shown on guided tours with its furnishings, including Truman's desk.