Square, Plaza sights in San Juan
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Plaza de San José
Adjacent to the uppermost terrace of the Plaza del Quinto Centenario, where it meets Calle San Sebastián, is the Plaza de San José. This relatively small cobblestone plaza is dominated by a statue of Juan Ponce de León, cast from an English cannon captured in the raid of 1797. The plaza is probably the highest point in this city and serves as a threshold to four cultural sites on its perimeter. The neighborhood around the plaza, on San Sebastián and the intersecting Calle del Cristo, is the original home of the restaurant, bar and café scene that began in Old San Juan more than a decade ago.
There are still plenty of places to grab a bite to eat in a shady building o…
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Plaza de Armas
Follow Calle San Francisco into the heart of the old city and it opens on to the Plaza de Armas. This is the city's nominal 'central' square, laid out in the 16th century with the classic look of plazas from Madrid and Mexico. In its time, the plaza has served as a military parade ground (hence its name), a vegetable market and a social center.
Shade trees, banks of seats, and a couple of old-fashioned coffee booths still make the plaza the destination of choice for couples taking their evening stroll. The beat of a bomba drum has also been known to light up an otherwise humdrum evening.
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Plaza de Colón
Tracing its roots back more than a century to the 400-year anniversary of the first Columbus expedition, the Plaza de Colón lies across the street from the lower part of Fuerte San Cristóbal. The city wall on this end of Old San Juan was torn down in 1897, and the plaza, with its statue of the 'Discoverer' atop a pillar, stands on the site of one of the city's original gated entries, Puerta Santiago.
Today, the plaza acts as a gateway to much of the traffic entering the city from Av Muñoz Rivera. Buses and taxis congregate on the plaza's south side.
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Plaza del Quinto Centenario
It's surprising to find such a modern square shoehorned in among all the architectural antiques, but the small Plaza del Quinto Centenario was built in 1992 to honor the 500-year anniversary of Christopher Columbus's first voyage to the Americas.
Constructed for a rumored cost of around US$10 million and decorated with a craning totem pole - El Tótem Telúrico - of ambiguous significance, the plaza offers great views over El Morro and the ocean and, from a distance, blends in subtly with the surrounding buildings.
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