Why Britons ought to discover Puerto Rico

Recently in the news over a jibe made at a Trump rally, this beautiful island offers beaches, fascinating culture and few UK tourists

The rose-red promise of the sunset, blooming behind the ramparts of the Castillo San Felipe del Morro, is one of the Caribbean’s greatest sights. As the sky shifts through its various end-of-day shades, this 16th century Spanish fortress – pinned to the western tip of its miniature peninsula – turns to silhouette. Sitting on the grassy expanse in front of it, watching kite-flyers harness the evening winds as the lights of Old San Juan begin to twinkle behind them, I am wholly entranced by the picture. It is, all told, rather lovely.
Certainly, you would struggle to dismiss it as “a floating pile of garbage”; the phrase deployed to mock Puerto Rico by the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, speaking in New York, at a rally for Donald Trump, last Sunday. Apparently meant in jest, the words were sufficiently intemperate for the former president’s campaign team to issue a statement that “this joke does not reflect the views” of the Republican candidate – amid speculation that the comment may yet cost him Latino votes in a tight and increasingly bitter election.
Whether Hinchcliffe’s sense of humour does prove to be expensive will be revealed in the coming days. But on Puerto Rico itself, it is likely to have prompted little more than a resigned shrug of the collective shoulders. Because the largest chunk of the American Caribbean is used to being disparaged. Even after almost seven decades, the outside perception of the island is still, perhaps, most clearly defined by the racial tensions outlined in the 1957 Sondheim-Bernstein musical (and subsequent movies) West Side Story – where the Sharks street gang are recent immigrants from San Juan to New York.
In truth, Puerto Rico’s relationship with the USA has been complicated ever since it passed from Spanish into American hands via the Treaty of Paris in 1898. In some ways, it remains caught between the two countries; visibly, audibly and linguistically Hispanic in its culture, food, music and heritage – yet tethered to Uncle Sam, not by the formality of full statehood, but via the looser arrangement of being a “US Territory”.
The statehood question has been discussed regularly, without resolution. Six referenda have been held on the issue since 1967; the most recent, in 2020, producing an (admittedly non-binding) outcome of a narrow 52-48 split in favour of those wanting complete integration into US life. The sense of an island stuck between worlds extends to its own internal discussions.
In other ways, much of this is immaterial. Because beyond geopolitics, beyond the ballot box, beyond all such noises and distractions, Puerto Rico is a place of remarkable beauty.
The fourth biggest island in the Caribbean – eclipsed only by its immediate neighbour Hispaniola (the troubled combination of the Dominican Republic and Haiti), as well as Cuba and Jamaica – Puerto Rico offers 270 miles of coastline, and some of the region’s finest beaches. Should you opt to spend a few days on its sands, you might aim for the gorgeous arc of La Playuela at its south-west corner, or Crash Boat Beach at its north-west.
The landscape is lushly forested in other places, while there is buzz aplenty in the urban pockets which underpin a wider population of 3.2 million. And an air of history hangs over everything, drifting back past Spanish conquest to the mists of the island’s indigenous yesteryears. Outside perception and verifiable reality are very different things.
So why is it not well-known as a destination?
An American responding to that question would argue that it already is. Some 5.1 million passengers land at San Juan’s Luis Muñoz Marín Airport each year. The vast majority are sun-seekers from the US mainland, who know they can fly in and flop without a passport.
But for British tourists, the story is different: Puerto Rico is a mystery package that hardly anyone bothers to unwrap. In the main, this is down to a relative inaccessibility. There is no non-stop flight between the UK and San Juan; the last “direct” service, launched by British Airways (from Gatwick) in March 2011, had been scrapped come the April of 2013, in what the airline referred to as “a commercial decision”. There seems scant chance of a restoration when Barbados, St Lucia et al provide such easy Caribbean alternatives. Even that short-lived BA route paused in Antigua on its way to Puerto Rico.
Yet those who attempt to make the journey by following an indirect path – Madrid and Miami tend to be the most pragmatic change-points – find a great deal to enchant them.
“This is a 500-year-old city,” Pablo Garcia Smith tells me, when we meet in Plaza de la Beneficencia. “You cannot take a step without there being tales and history and legends.”
And, more pertinently, things to eat. A guide for San Juan-based food-tour specialists Spoon, Smith will take me on a dash around some of the Puerto Rican capital’s key culinary hotspots. We stroll through the Cuartel de Ballajá, the one-time Spanish barracks which now doubles as an art gallery (the Museo de las Américas) and a nest of cafes, Don Ruiz Coffee serving strong brews in the old colonnade. We halt at La Taberna Lúpulo, the sort of day-drinking haunt where you might find yourself on a stool next to Hemingway’s ghost, perhaps sipping at a “Beermosa” (a pleasing mixture of ale and passionfruit juice).
And we dip into Deaverdura, an unfussy restaurant serving local favourites. Pablo talks of the “Columbian exchange” – of food and flavours, between the Old and New Worlds. “It is still ongoing today,” he muses. “Who had heard of quinoa 15 years ago?” It is an excellent point, even if the portion of pork shoulder with beans and rice, placed in front of me on the formica table, is more hearty than hip. Still, it is also utterly Puerto Rican.
But then, such flourishes of identity are not hard to find. Soft in its sunset glow, the Castillo San Felipe del Morro is a staunch sentinel in the midday glare. It protected San Juan so effectively over four centuries, in both the Spanish and American eras, that it was still operational during the Second World War. Deep in the old town, the Catedral de San Juan Bautista is so firmly grounded a foundation stone that, constructed in 1535, it ranks as the oldest cathedral on American soil, outpacing the missions of New Mexico by almost a century.
The Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, meanwhile, offers a contemporary twist on the theme in the more modern district of Santurce. Its exhibits are diverse – the Miss World crown won by Puerto Rican actress Denise Quiñones in 2001 sits in the same collection as La Virgen del Cafe, a 1983 painting by artist Marta Pérez which riffs on traditional religious iconography, placing the Virgin Mary next to the island’s bounteous coffee crop – but hint at the same thing. A place with soul, and a grasp of its own worth.
The fertile landscape implicit in Perez’s brushstrokes is most obvious 30 miles from San Juan, where El Yunque National Forest cloaks the north-east corner of the island in green.
Part protected playground, the only tropical rainforest in the US’s National Forest system, it is also part buffer zone – its thick foliage acting as something of a brake on hurricane winds barrelling into the island from the east. But on the day I visit, it is nothing less than tranquil. La Coca Falls spills down its slick slab of black-grey rock; the Angelito Trail curls down to the slow currents of the River Mameyes.
And the Yokahu Tower – named after a benign spirit of the forest, venerated by the island’s pre-Columbian inhabitants – rises above it all, its observation deck offering a panorama at 1,575ft (480m). Down in the trees below, the endangered Puerto Rican Parrot burbles among the branches, while the Rio Blanco Petroglyphs remember the indigenous Taíno who once strode these paths.
The precise location of these boulder carvings is kept secret, but numerous other strands of yesteryear wrap themselves around the island – if you know where to search for them.
On the south coast, for example, Ponce is named after Juan Ponce de León, the ruthless conquistador who became the island’s first Spanish governor in 1509 (and is buried in San Juan’s cathedral). But it takes its cue from a less frenetic era. Though it has fallen away from its glory days as a hub of coffee and sugar export in the 19th century, it wears its experience well.
Its own cathedral, a neoclassical jewel built in 1839, has weathered wind and earthquakes to stand, elegance enshrined, at the heart of the Plaza Las Delicias. Alongside it, a statue recalls Juan Morel Campos – the composer, born in the city in 1857, who is considered one of the chief exponents of Puerto Rico’s lilting danza music.
Then there is a more recent tale – half a mile east, at the south end of Callejon Comercio, where the Mural Para Pensar (“murals to make you think”) covers one side of a disused fish market. Many of its paintings concern the devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria, whose arrival in September 2017 caused some 2,975 deaths on the island. With this, the tone of the art is understandably sombre, though it takes time to point an angry finger at the island’s last key encounter with the man who would be president again – capturing Trump during his notorious visit to an emergency shelter, where he tossed paper towels at survivors in a manner which overlooked the seriousness of the situation.
Whether he returns to the White House next week, and whether his relationship with Puerto Rico improves if so, the island is unlikely to change a tune that can be feisty, and yet fabulous.
For many visitors from the American mainland, a holiday to Puerto Rico does not stretch far beyond the luxury resorts on the north coast, on either side of San Juan. It often doesn’t need to. A case in point is the Condado Vanderbilt, the five-star property which marked the birth of upscale tourism on the island when it opened in 1919. It retains its sophisticated sheen and splendid location today, and has added four swimming pools to the mix. A seven-night getaway, flying from Heathrow (via Boston) on December 7, costs from £1,511 a head, with Expedia (020 3024 8211).
While the island’s feathered population has long suffered the effects of deforestation, it clings to the canopy in remote and special places. Naturetrek (01962 733 051) offers a nine-day “Birds of Puerto Rico” escorted tour which explores not just El Yunque National Forest but the likes of the Rio Abajo State Forest and the Laguna Cartagena National Wildlife Refuge, in search of the Puerto Rican Parrot and the Elfin Woods Warbler. The next edition of the trip is scheduled for March 7 to 16 2025 (with another to come in March 2026) – from £4,295 per person, including international flights.
A wider glimpse is provided by the “Tropical Puerto Rico” itinerary offered by Flashpack (07883 301 912). This five-day group trip, aimed travellers in their thirties and forties, drops anchor in San Juan, but also enjoys a bomba dance workshop on the beach in north-coast Loiza, and heads to Vieques to admire the bioluminescence of Mosquito Bay. From £1,685 per person, not including flights. Regular departures in 2025.
There are no non-stop flights to Puerto Rico from the UK. Indirect options include Iberia (020 3003 2109), via Madrid, American Airlines (020 7660 2300) via Miami or Philadelphia – and Delta (020 7660 0767) via Boston and JFK.
discoverpuertorico.com; visittheusa.co.uk

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