December 5, 2015: San Juan from the Sea
As beautiful as San Juan PR is when walking its streets, it's hard to beat its view from the sea.
As beautiful as San Juan PR is when walking its streets, it's hard to beat its view from the sea.
One of the unique sights of Old San Juan is Parque de las Palomas. Most cities consider pigeon to be pests, but in San Juan they built a park to be home to them.
I was scanning through my photos of Puerto Rico a few weeks back, enjoying the great architecture of the Old San Juan, and was reminded of how amazingly beautiful and colorful the old city is. I though I'd share a few of these sights with you as...
For many years growing sugar was the main industry in Puerto Rico. It has left many abandoned plantations in its wake. But Aguirre Central goes way beyond a plantation. Aguirre was a company town. And its purpose was refining sugar. The...
Puerto Rico's Capitol building is not quite iconic—although its decor includes artwork of iconic themes and events in Puerto Rican history that will probably come clear now that you know where it is...and Jonathan L did. It sits on a bluff...
Seaborne Airlines and JetBlue are hooking up for some Caribbean codeshares that will let JetBlue sell tickets to destinations in the Virgin Islands, Netherlands Antilles, Martinique and the Dominican Republic. Seaborne, originally based in the...
I’m sure there must be some place without birds, but I haven’t been there. And everywhere I have been, the birds have caught my attention....
That's a tough question...and can only really be decided by tasting and tasting and tasting and...well, we couldn't spend all our time at it, could we? So, intrigued in advance by tales of great ice cream and unusual flavors, we identified...
Caguas is a late-comer by some standards; San Juan, 30 miles away, was already 250 years old when Caguas was settled by Spain—and yet it proudly calls itself “La Ciudad Criolla” and “El Corazon de Borinquen,” the Creole...
If Old San Juan and the El Yunque rain forest and the beaches have been drawing visitors for hundreds of years, that's certainly not true for this hidden attraction: a vast, and still-not-fully-explored system of caves, carved out by the world's...
On our second-to-last day in Puerto Rico, we headed to the south shore of the island, to the city of Ponce. It's smaller than San Juan, has less tourist traffic—all that, and yet it considers itself the cultural equal of the capital or of...
San Juan, Puerto Rico is a city of contrasts, of modern skyscrapers, crowded residential areas of different eras, resort hotels and casinos along Condado, and much more...but the image that usually comes to mind is really that of Old San Juan, the...
As Gumbo readers know by now, a lot of us who write these pieces are suckers for markets, large and small, wherever we go. If an army travels on its stomach, an army of bloggers stocks up at the public market. So, on our recent trip to Puerto...
Because Puerto Rico was the first freshwater island for 16th-century travelers from Spain, and because it guards the entrance to the Caribbean, its Spanish masters went out of their way to defend it, not only with the huge fortifications at the...
When we began planning a trip to Puerto Rico, and planning to include our 14-year-old granddaughter, we sent her some of the material we were gathering and asked her what her priorities were. She, and we, both had El Yunque right near the top of the...