Encounter|Hotel Nacional de Cuba — The Terrace Above the Wall

From the gardens of the Hotel Nacional you look down on the same seawall where the drama begins.

The hotel sits on Taganana Hill in Vedado, a 1930 pile of towers and lawn that has outlasted governments. Encounter used it as the Havana face of Donghwa, the Korean hotel group Cha Soo-hyun is supposed to expand. She walks these terraces as a professional. She leaves them as someone who has already met Kim Jin-hyuk on the Malecón below.

The production spent about a month in Havana in 2018. Wikipedia and the Korean broadcast record list the Nacional with Castillo del Morro and the Malecón as the three Cuban anchors. Guests still take coffee on the lawn facing the strait. The cannons on the slope are real. The view is the one the camera borrowed for a woman who had never chosen her own evening.

You do not need a room key to understand the geography. Walk the public edge of the hill. The wall is under you. The harbour mouth is to the right. Encounter needed height so the chance meeting on the stones would look small, and then inescapable.

Photo: public domain, via Wikimedia Commons