World Press Photo’s exhibition Con los pies en la tierra, or Down to Earth, is on display in Havana as a free open-air installation on the esplanade of the Castillo de San Salvador de la Punta, on Prado y Malecon in the city’s historic waterfront. The show is open to anyone who can walk by. No ticket. No booking. Just a public promenade, a fortress, and 21 award-winning photo stories about climate change and climate futures hanging in the open air where the city’s ordinary people already move.
Who Gets to Walk Through
The exhibition opened on Wednesday, 12 August 2026 and runs through Monday, 7 September 2026. Because it sits outdoors on a public promenade, visitors can pass it at almost any hour. The article says the best light is early in the morning or in the golden hour before sunset. That’s the kind of access most cultural institutions pretend to offer while still keeping their doors, prices, and schedules under tight control. Here, at least for now, the work is out in the open.
The show is organized locally by Fototeca de Cuba, the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Cuba and the Office of the City Historian, with support from the EU Delegation in Cuba. The images and curation come from World Press Photo itself, based in Amsterdam. The names at the top matter. They always do. The exhibition may be free to the public, but the machinery behind it still runs through embassies, official offices and international institutions that decide what gets shown, where it gets shown, and under whose seal.
The People and the Damage
Photographers featured include Lalo de Almeida, Ami Vitale, Kadir van Lohuizen, Luca Locatelli, Amber Bracken, Matthew Abbott, Sandra Mehl and Simone Tramonte, among others. Their projects cover wildfires, floods, disappearing ice, drought and the ways communities are adapting. Those are the conditions ordinary people are left to live through while the powerful keep issuing statements, funding exhibitions and calling it awareness.
The article places the show on the esplanade of the Castillo de San Salvador de la Punta, the small stone fortress at the mouth of Havana harbor where the Prado promenade meets the Malecon at the northern edge of Old Havana. That location matters. A fortress is still a fortress, even when it’s being used as a gallery wall. The city’s waterfront becomes a stage for climate images, while the systems that drive the damage remain far from the promenade.
What the City Looks Like from Below
The article says the area is well used by families and couples into the evening. It also says visitors should wear a hat and sunscreen, carry water and comfortable shoes, and keep aware of their surroundings after dark. That’s the real texture of public life here: people making their own way through a city shaped by heat, distance and the practical need to look after themselves.
It says Havana apartment rents run somewhere around US$300 to US$800 a month, and that the Malecon becomes a gathering place at sunset. Those numbers sit beside the exhibition like a quiet reminder that access to the city, to housing, and to the waterfront itself is never evenly distributed. The promenade may be open, but the city around it still sorts people by what they can pay, where they can live and how long they can stay out.
The exhibition’s free entry is real. So is the hierarchy around it. The public gets the walk, the view and the pictures. The institutions get the credit, the curation and the authority to frame climate collapse as a cultural event on a fortress wall.