Half a thousand years ago, in 1508, Juan Ponce de Leon arrived on the island of Puerto Rico and set up an outpost near the back of the great harbor on the island's northeast coast. He had with him a company of soldiers, a famously vicious red dog named Becerillo, and permission to use whatever means necessary to convince the local Taino people that they would rather look for gold in the rivers and salvation in heaven than carry on enjoying their little tropical paradise.
The island, which the locals called Boriquen, had been previously discovered and named San Juan by Columbus, whose physician described it glowingly, especially the houses with their "beautiful gardens, as if they were vineyards or orchards of orange or citron trees." But Ponce de Leon, whom one historian described as "a bastard son of the best-known family in Seville," wasn't much interested in fruit. "We came to serve God," as one of his generation of conquistadors famously said, "and also to get rich."
Today, Old San Juan is a place of narrow cobbled streets and blocks of well-preserved colonial architecture where you can glimpse a microcosmic vision of the entire post-Columbian history of the Americas, from the essentially medieval mayhem of the early European invasion to the madcap Nuyorican partying of the 21st century. Though it's not in exactly the same location as Ponce de Leon's original settlement, that hardly matters: It is the restaurant-, nightclub- and museum-packed heart of what is arguably the most vibrant city in the Caribbean, not to mention the most exotic urban setting Americans can get to these days without a passport.
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Following the wall
Having recently emerged from a long personal obsession with the Spanish explorers who followed Ponce de Leon to North America, a quest that resulted in my most recent book, I took my family last winter to the city. Like almost all visitors, we started at El Morro, the great fortress with its cannons pointing out to sea. It was Sunday midmorning when we walked across its great lawn toward the battlements, and it seemed as though all the residents of the city had gathered on the sunny hillside to picnic and fly kites of all shapes and sizes: there were dragons, ships of the line, bats and Spidermen, all dipping and diving in the trade winds and attached by long strings to smiling children.
El Morro, it seemed to me, belonged to all five centuries of the city's past and present. It was begun in the first decades of the Spanish occupation of the island, when the city's location was chosen because of its harbor near the border between the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. Construction continued through the second century, when its cannonballs flew against pirates and Englishmen, and the third century, when the cannonballs flew against pirates and Dutchmen. In the 1800s, nationalists were jailed in its dark dungeons, and the cannonballs flew against pirates and Americans, while in the 1900s the guns were fired by Americans against the Germans. Once the proud symbol of Spanish military power in the hemisphere, it's now a national historic site.
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The paranoid grandeur of global empires is evident everywhere in Old San Juan. As massive as El Morro is, and as long as it took to build, it wasn't enough. With gold and silver flowing from Peru and Mexico, the harbor's strategic location near the major routes into the Caribbean made San Juan more important than ever and more forts were built there - La Fortaleza, San Cristobal and several smaller structures that are now gone.
And grandest of all, in 1630 with taxes levied elsewhere in the empire, construction began on La Muralla - the Wall. When it was finished, nearly 200 years later, it encircled the entire city. It was built, in large part, by slaves: "For the love of God send 100 negroes," wrote a military captain to Madrid, "we can scarcely work for the great heat." The Africans were needed in the 1600s because the Indians, for the most part, were dead.
In the afternoon light we wandered along the Paseo de la Princesa, the promenade that traces the foot of the wall on the outside. For a stretch, near the cruise ship docks, it was a lively and shaded place full of street vendors and other entertainments, with the wall a friendly backdrop. Only when the path turned a couple of corners and passed the San Juan Gate, taking us between the restless sea and the patient wall toward El Morro in the distance, did the sheer enormity of the undertaking make itself clear. Lore has it that the queen of Spain, upon being asked by a courtier why she gazed out at the sea so intently, replied, "So much gold has gone to fortifying Puerto Rico that I half expect to see it gleaming there on the horizon."
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The walls - 12m high in places, 14m thick at the base - feel military and medieval, but the blocks protected within them are of a more elegant vintage. Pretty much any street we chose to walk down in the heart of Old San Juan was a trove of 18th-century Spanish colonial architecture. There were plenty of earlier and later structures mixed in, like the Iglesia de San Jose, which was built in the 1530s and is suitably Gothic for the second oldest Christian church in the Western Hemisphere. And never mind that the stores on the first floor on Calle del Cristo might be Ralph Lauren or Ben & Jerry's, the overriding feeling was early to mid-1700s.
Old San Juan is not a big area, seven blocks by six blocks, give or take a few, with tiny streets cobbled with distinctive glassy, bluish cobbles that mostly came during the 18th century as ballast in ships bound for the Indies. On back streets, big wooden doors set into pastel walls give way to Andalusian-style courtyards, and narrow second-story balconies are sometimes festooned with plants.
Each block has its own flavor, some congested with cars or tourists, some filled with interesting shops, some seemingly almost forgotten.
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Enjoying rum and bomba
One time, we came in the same way that a person arriving in San Juan in a ship in the latter half of the 1700s would, through the San Juan Gate, known as the "water gate" because it was the primary route into the city from the sea. In those days on wobbly land-legs we would have walked the steep and verdant (today at least) block of Calle San Juan to the Cathedral of San Juan to give thanks for our safe arrival. In our case, we toured the church, which is lovely and mysterious in the way Catholic churches ultimately are to the uninitiated. Then we went across the street and had a deliciously languid lunch in the portico of El Convento Hotel, which once was a convent and now has a painting in the lobby that looks remarkably like Jesus on a cell phone. We wished we were staying there.
We wished the same thing about Casa Blanca, the house that was constructed in the 1520s for Ponce de Leon. He himself didn't live long enough to occupy it, though for centuries his heirs did. With its high ceilings, dark wood floors and large unadorned windows overlooking the harbor, it has an elegant, almost modern feel.
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An old drawing of the city in the foyer suggests that the house you tour was actually constructed somewhat later than the 1520s, on top of the boxier first floor that served mostly as a refuge in times of attack from disgruntled Taino slaves. (In an odd bit of synchronicity, in one of the outbuildings of Casa Blanca are housed some 15,000 Taino artifacts that are being carefully cataloged and stored in Ziploc bags, but have no suitable home.) Added even later still were the surrounding gardens, which were planted by the first American governor of the island in the 19th century.
Nonetheless, it's in the overgrown places down between the house and the city wall that the deep past can really sneak up on you. It's reminiscent of the last painting in Thomas Cole's Course of Empire cycle, with great trees and vines slowly overtaking the ancient parapets, and you get the feeling that there are cycles of history at work in Old San Juan that don't measure time in centuries.
The 19th century is when sugar overtook coffee as the primary export crop of Puerto Rico, which seemed as good a reason as any for making a stop at the diminutive Don Q rum museum and shop across the street from Pier 1, on the waterfront. Though the Cuban emigre Bacardi is the giant of the business and has an enormous distillery in San Juan, Puerto Ricans generally prefer the brand founded by Juan Serralles in 1865 in the city of Ponce on the island's southern coast. (Yes, there are free samples.)
Sugar and rum, of course, have roots that reach into slavery, and we went to the Museo de Nuestra Raiz Africana (Museum of Our African Roots) and the West African roots room of the Museo des las Americas, which are both worthwhile. But where we really felt ourselves lucky was later that night when we wound up quite by accident at the Plaza San Jose, on Calle San Sebastian, during a traditional bomba party. The bomba is a percussive and vocal music and dance with African ancestry, in which audience members take turns challenging the bank of drummers to match their moves with percussive expression and drummers counterchallenging the dancers.
hangover helper
One might argue that the survival of the past in places like El Morro and in dances like the bomba is what makes the present interesting and gives one hope for a lively future. Yes, that sounds good. But truth be told, it's usually coffee that gives me faith in the future, and Puerto Ricans grow and brew some of the best without all the foamy foofaraw we've been led to believe is necessary.
The place that turns the corner from 19th century to 20th century is the family-run bakery and coffee shop La Bombonera, founded in 1902. The counter is long and the booths are many, but we still had to get there as early as we could to avoid waiting in line. We ordered mallorca con mantequilla (a round, flat pastry dusted with confectioner's sugar and served with butter), cafe con leche and fresh orange juice. All around us locals were trading gossip and eating their breakfasts more slowly than we were. We marveled at the mallorcas when they arrived, and ordered another round.
As befits a breakfast place that opened at the turn of the century, La Bombonera was really only the beginning. What captures the essence of Old San Juan today, at least for travelers, is probably found on a plate in a lively restaurant, waiting to be eaten. It's a dish of mahi mahi ceviche, maybe, at the buzzy tapas restaurant Baru. Or a flank steak Creole style at the Parrot Club. Or a dozen other delectables at a dozen other restaurants in what is surely the cuisine capital of the Caribbean. Later - and later means pretty much all night long in Old San Juan, particularly if it's a Saturday - it's in a glass with ice and lime to be sipped between dances at any of a number of live music clubs that you find just by following your ears around Calle Fontaleza after hours.
But in the inevitable morning after, it is always back to La Bombonera for coffee and mallorca. More coffee. And then to the hill at El Morro, to lie back on the grass in the shadow of the great fort, to listen to the sea and watch the kites diving and dancing through squinted eyes. Perchance to doze.
Paul Schneider is the author of Brutal Journey: Cabeza de Vaca and the Epic First Crossing of North America.
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