Bomba and bioluminescence—Puerto Rico is full of surprises

The inhabitants of San Juan aren’t early risers. At 9am, the city’s streets are largely empty. In the Plaza Colón, there’s a cockerel scrabbling about in the flower beds. A kiosk selling coffee and empanadas is untroubled by customers.

“We like a slow start,” Laura Ortiz-Villamil confirms as we sit in the shade, the sun already blazing. In front of us is a statue of Christopher Columbus, a crucifix raised in his left hand. Among the first Europeans to barrel over the Atlantic, all eager to get their hands on whatever land they could, he ‘discovered’ Puerto Rico in 1493 and immediately claimed it for Spain.

“The Spanish called it Puerto Rico — rich port — wrongly believing there was gold here,” Laura says as we set off on a stroll around the capital’s historic district, Old San Juan. A born-and-bred Puerto Rican, with tattoos on her arms ranging from Gabriel García Márquez quotes to Peanuts characters, historian Laura set up her guiding company in 2022 to share her country’s “less-known stories, good or bad”. We wander cobbled streets flanked by houses with arched wooden doorways and overhanging balconies, painted in every colour you might think of: pistachio, peach, lemon, spearmint. Some are in a state of beautiful decay, untouched for centuries; others are as spick and span as if the decorators only just moved out.

Given its architectural wealth, and the thick walls the Spaniards built to protect it, it’s clear San Juan was indeed a rich port for some time, despite the lack of gold. “The attraction was mainly due to its location in the Caribbean,” Laura tells me. “Take control of the island and you take control of the passage of commerce.”

We stop at the 16th-century Catedral de San Juan Bautista, a pale yellow edifice fronting a square shaded by mahogany and almond trees. Gesturing down a street leading to the remaining city gate, the ocean beyond, Laura says, “The tradition was that people would arrive by ship and come straight up to the cathedral to give thanks for their safe journey.”

Not everyone was grateful to be here, however. The Spaniards effectively used Puerto Rico’s first inhabitants as slave labour. When the Tainos — who are believed to have arrived from Venezuela 1,700 years ago — died or escaped to nearby islands, they were replaced with enslaved Africans. “Everyone here has a bit of Taino in them and a bit of African,” Laura says. “You can still see the African influence in our music and food.”

To see something of that influence, we head to the northern edge of the district, looping through the grounds of San Juan’s 16th-century fort. At an overgrown section of the city wall, we meet Eddie Ramirez, a warm smile radiating above his salt-and-pepper beard.

Eddie runs Casa del Sol B&B, on the street where he was born in Old San Juan. The 18th-century building, which once housed Spanish soldiers, is the city in microcosm; during its renovation, builders found a cannonball lodged in the wall, alongside swords and old coins. They’re now on display at the B&B along with wooden Taino masks — and the musical instruments Eddie is about to show me.

We take a concrete staircase to the lowest level of San Juan. The buildings here are more ramshackle than the old town, but just as colourful, some splashed with bright murals. “This used to be the city’s slaughterhouse, then a slum,” Eddie explains. Known as La Perla, it’s still one of the city’s poorest districts. “La Perla and Old San Juan are two different worlds.”

It’s the epicentre of Puerto Rico’s bomba scene, a dance-driven music brought from Africa in the 16th century. “The Spanish would bring wine and supplies in wooden barrels,” Eddie tells me. “The slaves would use them as drums to keep a connection with their home, and to send messages of rebellion.”

It’s a form that’s seen a resurgence in the past five years. One of the reasons why is sitting on the steps outside a modest workshop in La Perla, a barrel between his legs. Manuel ‘Manny’ Basquez learnt how to make bomba drums in 2021 and now helps others to do the same. He doesn’t sell them; if you want one, you must make it with him.

Eddie is a student — it took him five months to complete his first drum. They’re made in the traditional way, using deconstructed rum barrels and goat skin. Manny gives a little performance, setting an instrument on its side, slapping his fingers against the head and singing a mournful song of suffering and loss.

Bomba is still a music of rebellion, used to criticise the government or call for independence from the US, of which Puerto Rico has been an unincorporated territory since 1898. But it’s become a symbol of cultural pride, too, performed in national parades and casual drum circles alike. Every Friday night, locals gather to play and dance on a square moments from Manny’s workshop, pounding out rhythms as the Atlantic thrashes behind them. Born out of hardship and transformed into something joyful and unifying — perhaps the islanders struck gold, after all.

Marine riches

From the air, Puerto Rico is emerald and turquoise. It’s 25 minutes by prop plane from San Juan to Vieques, and the view for much of that time is of forest sweeping down from the mountains to the shore, with slivers of white sand separating it from the jewel-bright ocean.

It’s an apt preface to Vieques, a Puerto Rican island whose waters contain a multitude of wonders. To introduce me to some of them is Sarah Elise, a blonde-haired Massachusetts native who’s been running a snorkelling and conservation company here since 2019.

I meet her at the end of a bumpy track at Punta Arenas on the west coast. The ocean had rarely been out of view on the drive from the airport. Sometimes it rushed up to palm-fringed beaches; at others, it crept up to the land in a tangle of mangroves. At Punta Arenas, it lies beyond a narrow strip of sand shaded by sea grape trees. “We have some incredible natural resources here,” Sarah tells me as we pull on snorkels and flippers. “A lot of marine species start in the mangrove, then they go into the sea grass beds and then to the coral reefs.”

The corals off Vieques have taken a battering, suffering from the impact of Hurricane Maria in 2017 and from disease; Sarah uses some of the profits from her tours to finance treatment projects. The sea grass, however, appears in rude health. Soon, we’re drifting over it, watching as it dances with the current, shafts of sunlight striping the water between us.

The marine life is easy to spot: yellow-tipped lionfish hovering over brain corals; spotted eagle rays gliding over the sea bed; green turtles chewing on blades of grass then surfacing to breathe, their tiny heads bobbing in the waves. “Turtles are creatures of habit,” Sarah says as we surface ourselves. “They choose one area to feed in and they’ll graze there for months. Sometimes we’ll see 10 in one outing.”

With the light starting to fade, I leave Sarah and the turtles to make an appointment with another of Vieques’ marine inhabitants. It’s an hour’s drive to the rendezvous, following the northern coastline along the Atlantic before heading over the central hills and down to the Caribbean in the south.

It’s dark when I meet Texan-born guide Ryan Stoffle. “Time to go,” he says, handing me a paddle. “The hardest part of my day is waiting to go to work, so I’m really happy now.”

We clamber into glass-bottomed kayaks and push out from the shore. The water’s so calm it reflects the bright carpet of stars above, and we swoosh through it with meditative ease, setting a course towards Jupiter. After a while, a halo of blue light envelopes the kayak, so subtle I wonder if I’ve imagined it. But then, there’s more electric blue — rippling from the paddles, streaking through the glass beneath me. “It’s like we’ve charged the water!” Ryan shouts, laughing.

The cause of the display is dinoflagellate — bioluminescent organisms that flash to ward off predators. “You could fit three or four on the tip of a needle, and their glow is one hundred times the size of their body,” Ryan says as we float through a world made only of stars, burning white above, blazing blue below.

Mosquito Bay is the most bioluminescent place on Earth, and its status as a conservancy means the organisms are undisturbed by electric motors or people swimming. “We’ve been a conservancy for 14 years,” explains Ryan, “and the dinoflagellates are only getting brighter.” They get brighter the further we get from shore, too. There’s so much light darting around and beneath the kayak, I feel like I’ve entered hyperspace. Reaching down and taking a scoop of water is to hold a tiny galaxy in my hands. Adding to the surrealism, a dinoflagellate-covered eagle ray wafts below, a blue doormat pulsing in the dark.

It’s trippy enough knowing the scientific explanation behind the phenomenon; to the islands’ ignorant European settlers, the bay was an enchanted place to be avoided at all costs. According to legend, it got its name because Puerto Rican pirate Roberto Cofresi (El Pirata Cofresi) kept his boat, El Mosquito, in the bay. “Vieques was one of those lawless places where pirates could come ashore and do what they wanted,” Ryan tells me as we head back to land. “Cofresi would steal from ships arriving from Europe, then hide here, sharing his riches with the locals.”

There are stories of pirate treasure buried all over the island, hidden beneath the sands of its many beaches or sunk in the sea. Most are likely tall tales, but at least one pirate essential is a reality here, and I set out to find it the following day. Crab Island Rum Distillery — which takes the 17th-century European name for Vieques — occupies an old US naval base up a gravel track a short way from the coast. Horses and egrets pick around the field in front of it, the sea visible between the trees beyond.

Vieques-born Iván Torres, in a hoodie and Ray-Bans, greets me by the warehouse he uses to distil and store his spirits. As we take a seat at the distillery’s open-air bar, he says, “Puerto Rico is the rum capital of the world, and we had no rum on Vieques before this.”

He started by making moonshine in makeshift stills at home before launching his business. Crab Island has now been operational for six years, producing five handcrafted rums. Iván pours me a slug of each, from a coffee-infused number to a spirit aged in oak barrels for five years. They share a caramel finish, with the flavours of the Caribbean bursting through in spices like nutmeg and ginger. The distillery may take its name from Europe, but the product is Puerto Rican through and through. El Pirata Cofresi would surely approve.

Natural bounty

“There’s some magic here.” Draco Rosa is standing on the verandah of his white clapboard finca, surveying the land. With the exception of the ducks waddling about on the lawn in front of us, the scene is one of prehistoric wilderness. Giant ferns rock in the wind, royal palms and banana trees wave beyond them, and a swathe of unbroken forest rolls over the hills and into the mountains on the horizon. Dark clouds glower over the triangular peaks, having just dumped much of their contents on the finca. Post storm, Puerto Rico’s endemic coqui frogs are enthusiastically calling to one another, attempting to outdo the crickets, and bats put on an aerial display just feet from our heads.

It looks like humankind has little hand in the scene — and that’s just as Draco wants it. Known best in the UK as a member of boy band Menudo and writer of Ricky Martin’s La Vida Loca, Grammy Award-winning musician Draco took over the farm in 2007, and he’s been on a mission to restore it ever since, extending its original plot to 100 acres. “I spent six years looking for a farm before I found this place,” he tells me, long hair tucked beneath a battered hat, bright eyes framed by wire glasses. “I bought it as an investment really, but then I fell in love.”

It’s where Draco and partner Marilinda Rivera, or Mònse, come to recharge and rejuvenate. Now named Monte Sagrado (Sacred Mountain) Reserve and run as a coffee farm and eco-lodge, their sanctuary in the central hills of Puerto Rico feels considerably further removed from the world than the 90-minute drive from San Juan would suggest. “There’s something about this place and the centre of the island,” Draco says. “It just has this mystical quality.”

The farming heartland of Puerto Rico, and its oldest coffee-producing region, the Cordillera Central, is a place where every plot of land not taken over by forest has something cultivated on it: mango and papaya trees, coffee plants, neat rows of root vegetables. Mònse gives us a taste of the harvest that evening, bringing out dish after dish to a communal table on the verandah: chicken with green banana puree; breadfruit with steak and coffee sauce; coconut flan with rum-based coquito liqueur. All the produce is local, some of it from the finca itself. “I can take you to the exact plant we picked the breadfruit from,” she says with a laugh.

Fourteen acres of the reserve have been left as nature intended, but the rest of Monte Sagrado requires a delicate and studied touch, despite its wild appearance — invasive species have been removed, native flora has been replanted and the crops are continuously tended to. One of Draco’s longest advisers on its ecological management is local Jorge Perez. A self-taught botanist who runs an adventure tour company, Jorge has an encyclopaedic knowledge of seemingly every plant in Puerto Rico, as I discover when I join him the following morning.

Leaving the estate, we drive on roller coaster roads between steep hills, passing small houses engulfed by banana palms, with cultivated terraces rising behind them and cows grazing where they can. The road ends at a small finca growing yams, cassava and avocado, the owner standing among them with a machete. Continuing on foot, we follow a trail once used by farmers to take their crops to markets within the Cordillera Central.

We’ve barely started before Jorge stops to crush the seeds of an achiote plant between his fingers. It transforms into a bright orange paste. “People use this to colour food,” he says, smearing it on his face, “but you can use it as sunscreen, too.”

Sun protection applied, we set off again, Jorge bounding ahead, cheerfully pointing out the various medicinal uses of spices and mulberry, the cultural history of ceiba trees and the flavour profile of wild guava. The rain-slicked, rock-strewn path descends sharply and I shuffle along — often resorting to all fours, ever mindful of the tarantula holes dotted along the trail — while Jorge skitters down like a lizard. “Imagine doing this with your mule loaded with goods,” he yells.

Our reward is more immediate than the farmers’ ever was. The path comes to an abrupt halt at the Río Tanamá, a greenish slick of water that meanders between sheer cliff faces. We wade across it, the river at thigh height, and emerge within a giant limestone cave. Water drips from stalactites, ferns sprout from unlikely crevasses and vines dangle from the roof high above. It’s a cathedral of rock, with nature finding a way to flourish within. There really is magic here.