The walled city of the Caribbean — where Castillo San Felipe del Morro's 140-foot walls have defended San Juan Bay since 1539, Old San Juan's cobblestoned streets of blue-painted cobblestones (made from ballast stones from Spain, dyed blue with slag from 16th-century iron smelting) pass through the oldest city settled by Europeans in the Americas that is still inhabited, the rum of Bacardí (founded Puerto Rico 1936) flows through beach clubs and rooftop bars in equal measure, and Puerto Rico's position as a US territory creates a unique cultural blend where Spanglish is the mother tongue
San Juan (320,000 city; metro 2.4 million) is the capital and largest city of Puerto Rico — a self-governing US territory (neither a US state nor an independent nation) on the northeastern coast of the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico, the smallest and easternmost of the Greater Antilles. Old San Juan, the historic walled city on a small island connected to the main island by bridges, is the oldest inhabited European settlement in the US territories and one of the oldest continuously inhabited European cities in the Western Hemisphere (founded 1521, moved from an initial 1508 settlement). The…
The Taíno people (an Arawakan-speaking Indigenous people) inhabited Puerto Rico (which they called Boriken or Borikén) for at least 2,000 years before Spanish colonisation — Juan Ponce de León arrived in 1508 and established the first settlement at Caparra (4 km west of today's Old San Juan). The settlement moved to its current location on a small defensive island in 1521, was named Ciudad de Puerto Rico (and later San Juan Bautista de Puerto Rico), and became the most important Spanish colonial port and military hub in the Caribbean. The fortification system (Castillo San Felipe del Morro (E…