San Juan
Take note New York! Modern America started here.
Take note New York! Modern America started here.
With a name stamped in infamy, Vieques was where Puerto Rico’s most prickly political saga was played out in the public eye.
Ponce native son and author Abelardo Díaz Alfaro famously called Ponce a baluarte irreductible de puertorriqueñidad – a bastion of the irreducible essence of Puerto Rico – and strolling around the quaint square and narrow streets of the city’s...
You’ll know you’ve arrived in Rincón when you pass the group of sun-grizzled gringos cruising west in their rusty 1972 Volkswagen Beetle with a pile of surfboards attached to the roof.
An elusive lizard (not seen since 1974) hides in a unique mountain ‘boulder’ forest, a couple of abandoned US tanks lie rusting on a paradisiacal beach, a sign on a shop door in the ‘capital’ Dewey reads ‘Open some days, closed others.
For the uninitiated observer, Fajardo is no oil painting.
Ah…Mayagüez, the Sultan of the West, the commonwealth’s underrated and slightly disheveled dock town that has always had to play third fiddle to San Juan and Ponce.
Puerto Rico’s second-oldest city (after San Juan), San Germán is also one of its best preserved.
Covering some 28, 000 acres of land in the Sierra de Luquillo, this verdant tropical rainforest – recently rebranded El Yunque National Forest – is a shadow of what it was before axe-wielding Spanish conquerors arrived in the 16th and 17th centuries.
The area surrounding Luquillo contains some of Puerto Rico's finest beaches including the gleaming sands of the imaginatively named Playa Luquillo, and the less busy Playa Azul to the east.
La Parguera is a lazy, lovable seaside town, a somewhat disorderly magnet for vacationing Puerto Ricans and US expats who seem to spend most of the morning in bed, most of the day on the water, and most of the weekend half in the bag.
For aspiring golfers, the legend of Dorado has always been more about putting greens than gold.
Easy-going Boquerón, where Puerto Rico meets the Caribbean with a cool Calypso twist, is a colorful west-coast fishing community with wooden-shack restaurants and open-air food stalls that pulsates at weekends to a jaunty but inherently Puerto...
Approaching Arecibo today, it’s hard to imagine that this sprawling modern municipality of nearly 50, 000 people is Puerto Rico’s third-oldest city, after San Juan and San Germán.
Isabela is more famous for its surroundings than its urban attractions.
Less than an hour south of San Juan, the Bosque Estatal de Carite (Carite Forest Reserve; 787-747-4545; Rte 184 Km 27.
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