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Written and photographed by Juliet Highet
“All of the islands are beautiful but this last island appears to exceed all others in beauty”– Christopher Columbus, 1493

Out on the island
Lazy, sensual beats

I was not prepared for the remarkable beauty of the island, its diverse and spectacular landscapes, once one gets “out on the island”, as the locals say. Regard it as a blessing that Puerto Rico, which has an almost impossibly rich story to tell, is relatively
undiscovered as a tourist destination.

Out on the island, beyond the capital of San Juan, is the Taino and African heritage, as well as the Spanish, that shaped the island’s distinctive culture. The 500 years of Spanish influence are reflected in the varied architectural styles and atmospheres of each of the old colonial towns. You can go “out on the island”, literally, at a network of ‘gastronomic inns’, often set in restored historic houses, some of them in sleepy fishing villages nestling beside classic palm-fringed beaches. Relaxed and laid-back it may be, but everywhere, everywhere, the lazy, sensual beats of salsa, rumba and merengue music set the tone and the atmosphere of Puerto Rico.

Take the typical advertising image of a Caribbean island caressed by silver-sand beaches, possibly backed by spectacular mountain ranges. If that’s what you require of a holiday, Puerto Rico has 272 miles of beach, ranging from deserted coves to the lively shorelines of the resort areas. The north coast tends to be rougher than the south, posing a real challenge for watersports enthusiasts. Besides the privately maintained hotel beaches, Puerto Rico has some fantastic public beaches, including Luquillo Beach, just outside San Juan, our first venture “out on the island”. Such beaches offer all kinds of facilities, from the most basic – changing and parking – to scrumptious home-cooked fast food, crafts and the ubiquitous salsa music. After all, Puerto Rico is a member of the US Commonwealth, and therefore combines American standards of service and professionalism with a warm, easy Latin style of hospitality.

Tips of the island
Cadillacs and cosmetics

Far “out on the island”, at the southwestern tip of Puerto Rico, is the Cabo Rojo Peninsula. Since the turn of the century this has been a popular resort area, renowned for its splendid beaches and dramatic scenery. Its resorts are small and somnolent during the week, when we were there, but are rumoured to wake up at weekends. On the main street of Boquerón village, rusty Cadillacs were parked in front of equally dilapidated, pastel-painted wooden buildings. There were casual restaurants like Rena n’ Joe’s, and rundown bars straight out of a Spaghetti Western. Some of the buildings were draped with curtains of tropical flowers – shocking-pink bougainvillaea, scarlet and white hibiscus and fragrant frangipani. Kiosks sold seafood fritters or little oysters, eaten cold with a squirt of lemon. To collect this delicacy, fishermen raid the beds of the molluscs, encrusted in red mangrove in the lagoon.

I liked Boquerón, where the spirit of manana reigns supreme. Getting up very early one morning, I saw women in the main street applying their make-up for the new day, sitting on the wooden steps of their houses, comparing gossip and cosmetics. Making my way down between the houses, I reached the mile-long, white shoreline of Boquerón Bay, where bright little fishing boats were coming in with the night’s catch. A calm sea lapped the sweeping beach, punctuated by patches of coral and coconut palms. I wanted to stay for ever, but we were off to another fishing village, La Parguera, which has also developed into a popular resort but which has retained much of its small-town 1950s atmosphere.

Wooden houses on stilts extending into the sea, a couple of paradores or local inns and a few simple seafood restaurants, shops with desultory service, bars with pool tables and salsa music – that’s as lively as it gets in the utterly delightful town of La Parguera. The attractions of the area are natural – lovely beaches like Rosada or Caña Gorda (excellent for snorkelling). Scuba divers can explore the pinnacle reefs and shelf walls around Mata de la Gata cay.

More than 50 mangrove cays and islands decorate the tranquil sea around La Parguera, forming ornate channels through which we drifted in a boat until we reached a little cove in the middle of the mangrove forest, where we slipped off the boat and floated in the limpid water.

That evening we sailed again, across Phosphorescent Bay, where millions of luminescent microscopic organisms sparkled when disturbed by the movement of the boat. This ineffably fragile phenomenon is found only on protected shorelines in tropical waters and was magic to behold.mesones gastronomicosTaino, African and Spanish food

It was high time for dinner, and we wanted to sample food from the network of 50 mesones gastronómicos, which are sanctioned by the tourist authorities and are recognised for their excellence in serving moderately priced, typically Puerto Rican specialities. These ‘gastronomic houses’ are situated outside the capital San Juan, often in scenic surroundings, some in centuries-old haciendas, others (such as Villa Parguera) in new buildings in fishing villages.

Traditional Puerto Rican cuisine is a blend of Taino, African and Spanish cookery. Lunch and dinner at a gastronomic inn usually begins with sizzling hot appetisers such as bacclaitos (crunchy fish fritters), surullitos (corn sticks) and empanadillas, crescent-shaped turnovers filled with lobster, crab or conch fish or beef. At Boquerón’s Las Cascades, they added fried cheese to the starters.

These dishes are normally followed by a steaming bowl of asopao – a soup of beans, chicken or shellfish, all staples of the Puerto Rican diet. Main courses include bacalao, dried, salted cod cooked with various roots and tubers. All traditional Puerto Rican meals are served with deep-fried plantains (savoury bananas) and rice and beans, a bow to the African heritage of the island.

At every Puerto Rican meal I ate, a toast was raised: Salud, amor y pesetas, which translates as “Good health, love and money”. What more could you want – soul and spirit too? Puerto Rico has them.

Exposing tibes
Eight-hundred years under mud

When the rains of tropical storm Eloisa cascaded over the city of Ponce in 1975, the water exposed one of the most important archaeological centres of the Antilles. Tibes, the oldest burial ground of the region, built by the Tainos at least 800 years ago, began to emerge from the mud after being buried for centuries. What little is left of Puerto Rico’s pre-Columbian culture is preserved at several sites over the island, of which the Tibes Ceremonial Centre is the most accessible, on the outskirts of Ponce.

The Centre is located in an extensive botanical garden in which numerous varieties of trees and shrubs dating from the flowering of the Taino culture have continued to reproduce naturally. Our guide, who was of more or less pure Taino descent and looked quite different from other islanders, pointed out the therapeutic uses for the bark, leaves and seeds in this garden. The vegetation is the natural setting for the batayes or plazas where religious ceremonies, areytos, were performed in this sacred place. During the celebration of an areyto, the Tainos entered into a trance, engendered by song and dance, in order to communicate with their gods and to relate the history of their people to younger members.

The trees partially shade seven rectangular ceremonial ballcourts, and two dancing grounds, which date from 700AD. Stone points on one of the dance grounds align with the sun during equinoxes and solstices, indicating that Tibes may have been an astronomical observatory. And during the excavation that followed the rains of 1975, 187 skeletons of the Igneri culture were uncovered, dating from an earlier civilisation, from approximately 300AD. Facilities at the Tibes Centre include a good little museum with exhibits of Taino and other pre-Columbian ceramics, ornaments, utensils and amulets made of stone and shell.

Much later history, of the Spanish colonial variety, is showcased at the restored Hacienda Buena Vista in the hills north of Ponce. During the 19th century the city of Ponce was wealthy and sophisticated, as its fabulous architecture testifies; Ponce’s merchants and traders kept in touch with the important cities of Europe and the US. Yet it was on the labour of slaves, as well as on imported technology, that a hacienda like the coffee plantation of Buena Vista was founded. On a tour of the carefully restored estate house and assorted buildings you can see the meagre slave quarters as well as the mills and other farm machinery that still process coffee.

Rainforest
Buena Vista and El Yunque

The setting of Buena Vista is subtropical forest, rich in plant and animal life. Our walk through the rustling vegetation was a poetic experience – shafts of sunlight pierced dense walls of local and introduced trees and plants, illuminating the occasional bright wild ginger flower, a hummingbird that quickly darted off, a mangrove cuckoo or Puerto Rican screech owl. The forest floor crawls with colourful tree frogs and lizards, giant millipedes and blind burrowing snakes. (I confess I did not see all of these – but you might.)

Within sight of Luquillo Beach and hardly a stone’s throw from San Juan is El Yunque rainforest, a million miles away from the sunny beach scenario or sophisticated streets of the capital. More than 1bn gallons of rain fall annually in this huge forest, the only tropical rainforest in the US Forest Service. Named after a benign Tainospirit named Yuquiyo, the forest and Luquillo mountains sheltered Tainos and runaway slaves for over 200 years.

Majestic tabonuco trees towered over us, and Sierra palms with white flower spikes proliferated along the gullies carrying off the huge amounts of water that at times descended on us. Peering through the rain we spotted fingernail-sized orchids, tree ferns unfurling feather-like fronds and air plants growing on branches with scooped leaves that collect water for millions of inch-long tree frogs called coquis. You can imagine the cacophony of sound, aided and abetted by all sorts of rare birds, including the Puerto Rican parrot, once nearly extinct.

karst and charm
North-central Puerto Rico

On our way back to San Juan to leave this extraordinary little island, we passed through the north-central region of Puerto Rico, which contains one of the Caribbean’s most striking natural wonders – the Karst country. These are limestone hills formed over a million-year period from strong rains pounding on the porous terrain. One of the world’s most extensive cave networks, the Rio Camuy Cave Park is situated here, and houses the third largest underground river in the world. A little train winds down a crater-like sink-hole, its dark banks starred with white flowers, carrying visitors deeper and deeper into the earth to the mouth of the cave. Inside, we walked past gigantic stalactites and stalagmites, flow stones and canyons dropping hundreds of metres to the subterranean Rio Camuy. As we emerged blinking from another narrow, steep sink-hole, thousands of rivulets of water cascaded down the cliffs.

The Puerto Ricans have bags of easy-going charm and a fine line in music, too. What a revelation, then, to go “out on the island” and discover such a rich variety of spectacular natural beauty and atmospheric history.