Visiting Puerto Rico: the easiest Caribbean island to reach and the hardest to read

How people arrive

Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport in San Juan is the main entry point, and it handled more than 5.1 million passengers in 2022, up 6.5% on 2021. Because Puerto Rico is a United States territory, citizens of the United States need no passport, and the currency, the postal system and the mobile networks are the same ones they left. In 1999, an estimated five million tourists visited the island, most of them from the United States and nearly a third of them cruise ship passengers.

Tourism produced 8.9 billion dollars of revenue in 2022, which was 39% above the previous high in 2019, and travel and tourism contributed 6.9% of gross domestic product in 2019. Estimates that count the wider industry put the figure nearer a tenth of the economy.

The island competes with Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Aruba, Jamaica and Florida for the same visitors, and the competition is political as well as commercial. When the United States loosened travel restrictions on Cuba in 2015, Cuban visitor numbers overtook Puerto Rico's; when the restrictions were re-imposed in 2017, that reversed. Travellers bound for Saint Barthélemy, Saint Martin, Trinidad and Tobago or the Virgin Islands frequently connect through San Juan.

What is worth the time in Old San Juan

The San Juan National Historic Site holds two Spanish fortifications, El Morro at the harbour mouth and San Cristóbal at the landward gate.

Castillo San Felipe del Morro sits on a promontory above the entrance to San Juan Bay. Its foundation was laid in 1539 and the six-level fortification was not considered complete until 1787, which is nearly 250 years of continuous engineering. It was attacked by the English in 1595 and 1598 and by the Dutch in 1625. United States Navy ships fired on it in 1898 and destroyed the lighthouse, later restored, and the United States added an artillery fire control station during the Second World War. The seaward walls stand about sixty feet.

Castillo San Cristóbal guards the landward gate of the walled city. Construction ran from 1634 to 1790, and it covers 27 acres. The first shots of the Spanish-American War were fired here. Its best-known corner is the Garita del Diablo, the Devil's sentry box, from which sentries were said to disappear.

Both are open daily from 09:00 to 17:00, and both run ranger-led programmes through the week. La Fortaleza and the San Juan National Historic Site were inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1983.

The fortifications closed to visitors during the United States government shutdown of 2019, which is a practical reminder that the island's principal historic attraction is administered from Washington.

Where to go outside the capital

The government divides the island and its 78 municipalities into six tourism regions, explicitly to move visitors beyond San Juan.

El Yunque National Forest is the only tropical rainforest in the National Forest System, about an hour east of the capital, and it is the island's principal ecotourism destination. Visitor infrastructure was built there from the 1950s, alongside a network of state forests, recreation areas and parques nacionales, the Puerto Rican equivalent of state parks.

The bioluminescent bays are the single most distinctive natural attraction and the most fragile. Three exist on the archipelago, and the conditions that produce them, a narrow entrance, mangrove cover and stable salinity, are exactly the conditions coastal development destroys.

Deep-sea fishing became popular in the second half of the twentieth century, and Atlantic tarpon draw anglers to the island. Twenty casinos operate, all of them required by law to be attached to a hotel or resort inside a zone of historic or tourist interest.

Where the offshore islands differ

Of the islands around the main one, only Culebra and Vieques are inhabited year-round. Mona is empty for most of the year except for staff of the Department of Natural Resources, and Monito, Desecheo and Caja de Muertos are uninhabited.

Both inhabited islands are reached by ferry or a short flight, both are quieter than anywhere on the main island, and both carry a history that a beach holiday does not advertise. The United States maintained about 25 military or naval installations in Puerto Rico at various points in the twentieth century, and the Navy facilities at Vieques and Sabana Seca have since been deactivated and partly transferred to the local government. Large parts of Vieques and Culebra are now National Wildlife Refuges, which is what former ranges frequently become.

Puerto Mosquito on Vieques is one of the archipelago's three bioluminescent bays, alongside Laguna Grande at Fajardo and La Parguera at Lajas. All three are mangrove-fringed lagoons inhabited by the dinoflagellate Pyrodinium bahamense, and only seven bays anywhere in the Caribbean glow year-round. Tourism, pollution and hurricanes all threaten them, and the tourism is not the least of the three.

The southwest holds the other thing most itineraries miss. Guánica State Forest and Biosphere Reserve protects more than 600 uncommon species of plants and animals, including 48 endangered and 16 endemic ones. It is the opposite landscape to El Yunque, an hour and a half away, and the contrast between the two is the clearest thing a visitor can see about how the mountains divide this island.

When to go and what the season means

The dry season runs December to April and the wet season May to November, which coincides exactly with the Atlantic hurricane season.

That overlap is the structure of the year rather than a detail to work around. A visitor in September is travelling in the wettest and least expensive part of the calendar for the same reason. Average temperatures sit near 27 °C throughout, the south runs warmer than the north and the mountains cooler than either, so altitude is a more useful lever than season for anyone who dislikes heat.

The island's recovery from Hurricane Maria in 2017 took years. Damage was estimated at 100 billion dollars, and by October 2019 nearly all major visitor amenities in San Juan, Ponce and Arecibo were operating again, at which point the pandemic arrived. Concrete recovery in the numbers did not appear until 2022. Power failures remain a genuine consideration: the earthquake at the start of 2020 and Hurricane Fiona in 2022 each caused island-wide or near-island-wide outages.

Why the island argues about tourism

Tourism in Puerto Rico has been contested since it began, and the arguments have not changed much.

Upscale tourism dates from the opening of the Condado Vanderbilt Hotel on 16 October 1919. In the 1930s the United States promoted the island as a destination to generate revenue during the depression, and the travel advertising of the period presented Puerto Ricans as poor people eager to serve American visitors. The Caribe Hilton, built in San Juan in 1949, was a partnership between the Puerto Rican government and United States business, and a majority of Puerto Ricans opposed it on the grounds that the public money would have been better spent on schools and social welfare. San Juan's fire chief at the time objected to the local government degrading itself by buying tourists. A San Juan newspaper in 1952 described American tourists as people who did not care about the island and who would eventually persuade Puerto Ricans to serve them.

The modern version of that argument is about land.

Act 74 grants developers a ten-year tax exemption for building or remodelling tourism facilities, along with 90% property tax exemption, 90% income tax exemption, and 100% income tax exemption for operations on Vieques or Culebra. Act 20 and Act 22 of 2012, and Act 60 after them, exempt qualifying newcomers who spend at least six months on the island from federal, local, capital gains and passive income taxes, in some cases until 2035. Puerto Ricans born on the island do not qualify. More than four thousand applications for these benefits have been approved since 2012.

The housing effect is measurable. Many of the properties bought under these arrangements become short-term rentals, and in Rincón a two-bedroom apartment listing at about 290,000 dollars in 2017 was later listed near 420,000. That is happening in a territory where roughly 43% of the population lives below the poverty line.

Grassroots movements campaign against the privatisation of beaches, which are public land under Puerto Rican law. Playas Pa'l Pueblo, founded on 13 March 2005 to oppose a hotel expansion at Isla Verde, has litigated on behalf of environmental justice groups on the argument that resort expansion excludes Puerto Ricans from their own coast.

None of this is a reason not to visit. It is the reason to know which beach is public, which rental was somebody's home, and why a question about Act 22 will get a longer answer than expected.

What a visitor should actually know

The practical points that differ from a foreign Caribbean destination are few and they matter.

United States citizens need no passport, no visa and no customs declaration on arrival, and the currency is the dollar. Travellers from elsewhere need whatever United States entry documents they would need for any other part of the country, because immigration is federal.

Spanish is the language. English is widely understood in San Juan and in the tourist regions and much less so in the mountains and the smaller municipalities, and the island's own view of language is not neutral, given that English was imposed as the school language from 1902 to 1948.

Cruise arrivals and air arrivals see different islands. San Juan's port sits beside the walled city, so a cruise call delivers passengers directly into the one district that is entirely walkable, and delivers them for a few hours. The convention district overlooking the port has made the capital a business-events destination since around 2016, which is another kind of visitor who rarely leaves the metropolitan area.

Music has moved the numbers more than advertising has. The Puerto Rico Tourism Company spent a million dollars on a celebrity campaign in 2002. In 2017 Despacito, a song by the Puerto Rican artists Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee, produced a measurable spike in arrivals, and specifically in visits to La Perla, the San Juan neighbourhood in its video, a neighbourhood Hurricane Maria largely destroyed later that year.

Driving is the practical way to see anything outside the capital. The mountains are steep, the roads through them are slow, and the distance from San Juan to the far west is short on a map and long in practice.

And the island is not a single destination. A visitor who stays inside the walled city and the beach strip beside it will see a well-preserved colonial capital and almost nothing of a territory whose interior, southern coast and offshore islands are different places with different economies and, in the case of Vieques and Culebra, a separate history of military occupation and its aftermath.