Haitian art was never decorative — it is theology, protest and memory painted flat and bright. Three days here move from the oil-drum forges of Croix-des-Bouquets to Pétionville's private collections and the drum circles that outlasted every earthquake.
Haiti's oldest commercial gallery, run by the Monnin family since 1956 and now in a Pétionville villa. Holds Bigaud, Obin and Duffaut canvases plus contemporary Pascale Monnin sculpture. Open Mon–Sat roughly 09:00–17:00; call ahead as hours shift.
The pink-and-white 1914 cathedral collapsed on 12 January 2010, killing Archbishop Miot. Its shell of arches and rose-window frames still stands off Rue Bonne Foi as a deliberate memorial while reconstruction crawls on with UNESCO backing.
Croix-des-Bouquets, 13 km northeast, is where Georges Liautaud turned flattened oil drums into cut-metal art in the 1950s. Some 60 workshops now hammer fer découpé along one dusty lane — mermaids, loa figures, tree-of-life panels.
Haiti's gingerbread houses were built 1881–1925 by French-trained Haitian architects — steep hipped roofs, fretwork balconies, timber frames that flexed and survived 2010 better than concrete. Around 200 remain in Pacot and Bois Verna.
Built inside a restored 1760 sugar plantation on the Côte des Arcadins, this museum traces Taíno artefacts, colonial slavery machinery and the 1804 revolution across stone galleries and an original mill wheel. Roughly 90 minutes north by road.
Founded 1939 on Rue Hammerton Killick, the national library guards early 19th-century imprints, Dessalines-era decrees and Haitian newspaper runs. The reading rooms are quiet, fan-cooled and open to visitors who sign in with photo ID.
The busiest performing-arts venue in the capital, on Rue Chile in Bois Verna. Programmes contemporary Haitian dance, Creole-language theatre, jazz nights and film screenings, plus a médiathèque. Schedule published monthly on their notice board.
Richard Morse's mizik rasin band RAM has played Thursday nights at the Oloffson since 1990, fusing vodou rara horns and rock. The gingerbread hotel also inspired Graham Greene's Hotel Trianon in The Comedians.
Opened 1972 beside Champ de Mars, this holds the definitive naïf collection — Hector Hyppolite, Philomé Obin, Rigaud Benoît, Préfète Duffaut's terraced mountain cities. Damaged in 2010, partially reopened, hours irregular.
A working atelier and cultural foundation supporting papier-mâché mask makers, sequin-flag (drapo vodou) embroiderers and young painters. The beaded flags stitched here — Beauvoir and Antoine lineage — take weeks each.
Beyond the Santa María anchor, MUPANAH's lower galleries rotate Haitian painting and sculpture around the marble tombs of Dessalines, Christophe and Pétion, under the grassed pyramid roofs on Champ de Mars.
Bel Air is the birthplace of the capital's rara bands — bamboo vaksin trumpets, tin horns and tanbou drums rehearsing through Lent in the streets. It is a religious procession, not a performance staged for outsiders.