Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Plaza Las Delicias. Those interested in the island's precolonial indigenous roots are only a
short drive from Puerto Rico's largest and most educational archaeological site, the Centro
Ceremonial Indígena de Tibes.
The earliest western settlement saw a number of clashes between Spanish Conquistador
Ponce de León (from whom the town gets both its name and one of its many nicknames,
'City of Lions') and the Taíno tribes, but the region was claimed for the Spanish Crown in
1511. The city was established around 1630, when the Spaniards built the first incarnation
of the current cathedral and named it for the patron saint of Mexico, the Virgen de Guada-
lupe.
As the first port of call in the region - far from Spanish authorities in San Juan - Ponce
grew fat off the rewards of smugglers in the late 1600s. By the mid-1700s Ponce's bour-
geois society wanted at least a patina of respectability; Spanish merchants and wealthy
refugees from nearby Saint-Domingue (where slave revolts radically changed the order of
things) poured resources into legitimate enterprises such as tobacco, coffee and rum. Sugar,
too, became an important business, and entire plains (the same denuded ones you see today)
were shorn of greenery and replaced with silky, lucrative sugarcane. The added wealth and
polyglot mixture of Spanish, Taíno, French and West Indian peoples helped establish Ponce
as the island's earliest artistic, musical and literary center. The parlors of the bourgeois-
ie echoed with postured danza (an elegant ballroom dance with Caribbean origins), while
satirical, boisterous strains of bomba y plena, two distinct yet often associated types of folk
music, were shared by laborers.
That golden age ended in 1898 when Spain rejected America's demand to peacefully
observe Cuban independence, which spurred the start of the Spanish-American War. Com-
pared with modern definitions, it wasn't much of a scuffle, but the five-month skirmish in-
cluded an American invasion that landed in Guánica. By the time the 1898 Treaty of Paris
was signed, the United States held colonial control of not only Puerto Rico and Cuba, but
also Spanish colonies in the Pacific.
Under American colonial rule, Puerto Rico's economy was drastically transformed and
Ponce's sugar fields were lucrative for industrialized investors. In 1899 however, a pair of
hurricanes (one of which, San Ciriaco, was among the longest ever recorded in the Atlant-
ic) devastated the sugar fields and Ponce's industry never fully recovered.
These hurricanes started a period of long decline in the region. First went the sugar, then
the region's coffee trade took a nosedive the 1920s. In the harsh economic conditions of
following decades, Ponce became a hotbed of civic unrest. It boiled over during the Ponce
Massacre of 1937, which politically alienated Ponce from the rest of the island. Ponce was
already on its knees by the time the Americans' Operation Bootstrap, an ambitious island-
wide industrialization project, dealt a region a near-fatal blow by favoring the development
of ports on the north coast.
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