Between the Walls and the Sea

Puerto Rico was the Spanish crown's most prized Caribbean possession precisely because San Juan was, in theory, impossible to hold. The decision to build El Morro in 1539 launched two and a half centuries of construction that eventually made Old San Juan the most heavily fortified city in the Americas. The walls worked: Drake failed in 1595, Cumberland took the city briefly in 1598 but disease drove him out, and the Dutch failed in 1625. The fortifications did not, however, prevent the Spanish–American War from resolving Puerto Rico's fate in roughly four months in 1898. On the same day San Cristóbal fired the opening cannon of that war, the strategic logic that had justified 350 years of fortress-building became obsolete overnight. The walls stand today not as defences but as the best-preserved example of Spanish colonial military architecture in the New World.

What Spanish colonisation could not erase were the Taíno words that filtered into the world's vocabularies through Puerto Rico and the wider Caribbean. Hammock, hurricane, barbecue, iguana, manatee, tobacco, cassava and canoe all trace their etymology to the Taíno language. The Taíno people were largely absorbed into the colonial population within a generation of contact, but their vocabulary survived everywhere. The Taíno name for Puerto Rico — Borinquen — still lives in Boricua, the proudest and most personal way a Puerto Rican can identify themselves. It is older than the Spanish, older than the forts, and unlike the stone walls, no one has been able to dismantle it.