Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum Tours

Meet six-toed cats and watch as the life of one America’s great writers unfolds before your eyes at his former home.

Visit the Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum to reveal the eccentricities of Ernest Hemingway’s life. For most of the 1930s, one of the most revered authors of the 20th century lived in a Spanish colonial house in the heart of tropical Key West. Meet six-toed cats and see the studio in which some of Hemingway’s most famous novels were written. Find a vast collection of art, hunting trophies and household items as you wander through the house and gardens.

Ernest Miller Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954, mostly because of his masterpiece, The Old Man and the Sea, published just two years earlier. The former war correspondent and celebrated author lived in many different places and married four times before he died in 1961.

Find out what some of Hemingway’s most prized possessions were as you explore the rambling 19th-century building. Visit the living room to see furnishings brought back from Paris by Hemingway’s second wife, Pauline. Admire the collection of chandeliers and the 17th-century Spanish chest that has been converted into a workspace.

Venture through Ernest Hemingway’s studio to see the space where he wrote some of his gripping novels, including For Whom the Bell Tolls and Green Hills of Africa. Look through the wide windows to take in the gardens and make your way outside to meet the dozens of six-toed cats that are said to have descended from Hemingway’s own cat, Snowball. Take some photos with the playful creatures, which often readily interact with the visitors.

The Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum is located close to the Key West Lighthouse on the western end of the island in the Old Town Key West. There is some pay and display parking in the streets surrounding the museum and a very small parking lot. The museum is open daily, and the admission fee includes a guided tour. The tours run for about 30 minutes.