key west | Las Travel Blogueras

Six-toed cats at Hemingway house in Key West, FL. (Via: Yahoo Travel.)

We always wondered about the dozens of six-toed roaming freely around Hemingway’s retreat in Key West, Florida.

“About half of the people who come here come for the cats — not the architecture, not the literature, the cats,” said Dave Gonzales, the house’s curator to Yahoo Travel.

But where did the first six-toed cat come from? Back at the turn of the century, sailors believed that six-toed cats, also called gypsy cats, were good luck, and they wanted them aboard their ships. This led to an abundance of six-toed cats in porttowns like Key West, Fla., in the thirties and forties. Once Hemingway settled in Key West, a captain named Stanley Dexter gave the famous author Snowball, a six-toed cat which was the daughter of his own six-toed cat, Snow White. And, as it does not take two six-toed cats to make another, Hemingway’s iconic state was soon filled with the curious house animalito.