In a compartment fire, convective heat transfer dominates spread of the fire and smoke movement before flash-over occurs, and natural convection is very important in particular when there are no openings. The finite volume method with SIMPLE algorithm was applied to a square cavity similar to a compartment without an opening. The objectives of this study are to evaluate the method and to simulate natural convection from a hot body in the cavity. The results without the hot body showed an excellent agreement with those of previous studies. Streamlines, isotherms and Nusselt numbers were computed for different Rayleigh numbers.