Puerto Rico Travel Guide

Puerto Rico's present appears laid-back but its past brims with cannon fire and colonization, repression and revolt. Legend abounds: from San Juan's fortresses, scoured by siege, to the crumbling South Coast sugar refineries once powering the island's economy. European settlers built pretty plazas in harbor cities while political revolutionaries schemed rebellion in mountain villages. History enthusiasts can wander precolonial Tano ruins or coffee haciendas. Even if your interest is scant, it's hard not to get immersed in Puerto Rico's tempestuous story in Old San Juan, where enticing echoes of bygone times of colonists and swashbucklers and smugglers reverberate still.

Forest Thrills

Even those who stick to the coast cannot escape the alluring shadow of Puerto Rico's thick forests, as knotted labyrinths of mangroves create crucial shoreside wildlife reserves and the green glint of the inland forested hills is rarely out of sight.

The island's dense foliage invites a perpetual mystery to blanket it, as coqui frogs chant among giant tree ferns and roots reduce so-called roads to rubble. The forests here are internationally important, such as El Yunque, the only tropical rainforest in the US. A journey into them guarantees to awaken the adventurer within.

Paseo de la Princesa, San Juan | SEAN PAVONE/SHUTTERSTOCK

By Luke Waterson, Writer

The island seems to specialise in making seemingly run-of-the-mill experiences rapidly erupt into life-long memories. The first time I traveled along the ramshackle south coast, I remember expressing interest to some passersby in an off-shore cay and no sooner had the words left my mouth than the impromptu offers to take me out there flooded in. This epitomizes Puerto Rico for me: one moment a stroll along a crumbling sea wall and the next, a float in azure, mangrove-backed waters with a cold beer in hand.