Puerto Rico's Vieques & Culebra Islands

By Kurt Pitzer

Travelers who have spent time on the main island of Puerto Rico may have a "eureka!" moment upon arriving on the fantasy islands of Vieques or Culebra. The brightly colored cottages, tranquility and time_less feel of the so-called Spanish Virgin Islands i

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hunter Publishing
• Release date: Sep 2, 2009
• ISBN: 9781588438003

Kurt Pitzer

KURT PITZER is a former commercial fisherman who has reported from some of the world's most turbulent regions for The Boston Globe, The Sunday Times of London, the Los Angeles Times, and People magazine. He cowrote The Bomb in My Garden with Saddam Hussein's nuclear mastermind, Mahdi Obeidi, after helping him escape from Baghdad in 2003.

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Puerto Rico's Vieques & Culebra Islands

Kurt Pitzer & Tara Stevens

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© 2011 Hunter Publishing, Inc.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Tara Stevens' nearly insatiable appetite for travel began at age 17, when she took up residence in a tent on the Pembrokeshire coastal path of her native Wales. Among other adventures, she has hitchhiked through Turkey, ridden buses from India to Nepal, navigated the Río Magdalena in northern Colombia and played poker with the elderly women who live in the Peruvian sand dunes of Huacachina. In Ecuador, she worked as travel editor on the Quito-based publication Q. She has served as sub-editor for the Copenhagen-based design magazine CPH Living, contributes regularly to PR Week in London, and consults for several global brands in Denmark.

Kurt Pitzer has worked as a correspondent for newspapers and magazines such as The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and People for the past decade. He has covered stories ranging in topic from Balkan conflict to city politics. His travels and reporting have taken him on extensive journeys throughout Western, Eastern and Central Europe and the Americas. His adventures include building a bamboo hut and living with the Karen people in the northern Thai mountains, teaching journalism in Elsinore, Denmark, and commercial long-line fishing in the Caribbean, Atlantic and Pacific waters. He lives in Spain.

Introduction

The Land

History

<515448">Government

<134233">The Economy

<886586">Climate

<982220">Flora & Fauna

<255610">The People

<903200">Language

<110219">Religion

<167639">Music & Dance

<350161">Art & Culture

<307507">Food: A Taste of Puerto Rico

<579058">Festivals & Events

<318287">Getting Here

<90648">Vieques Island & Culebra Island

<527202">Overview

<797160">Vieques

<268011">History

<564921">Getting Here

<374942">Getting Around

<664174">Communications & Information

<2954">Touring & Sightseeing

<309059">Adventures

<777217">Where To Stay

<364616">Where To Eat

<152478">Nightlife

<365252">Culebra

<415430">History

<466935">Flora & Fauna

<156401">Getting Here

<993518">Getting Around

<708543">Communications & Information

<713333">Touring & Sightseeing

<824707">Adventures

<380782">Eco-Travel

<196258">Where To Stay

<400212">Where To Eat

<916783">Spanish Phrases

<482312">Bibliography

Introduction

The Land

The mountains of Puerto Rico

The main island of Puerto Rico is about 100 miles long and 35 miles wide, roughly the size of Yellowstone Park or the state of Delaware. It's the farthest east of the four major islands that form the Greater Antilles, which includes Cuba, Jamaica and Hispaniola (Haiti and Dominican Republic). In terms of geologic time, the Caribbean islands are relatively young. A mere 200 million years ago, as dinosaurs roamed the super-continents, the tectonic plates of North and South America separated, and a rectangular chunk of the east Pacific plate - now known as the Caribbean plate - knotted itself between them. Over the epochs, the Caribbean plate began to shift north, creating pressure zones in the Puerto Rican Trench, which, at 28,000 feet, is the deepest spot in the Atlantic Ocean. The result was a series of violent volcanic eruptions depositing heaps of magma and ash over the ocean floor. Puerto Rico emerged from the sea about 135 million years ago. Ensuing tectonic motion folded piles of debris into the mountains of the Cordillera Central, which forms about 60% of Puerto Rico's land mass and runs like a spine from the rain forest of El Yunque to the hills of Rincón. Due to heavy rainfall, most of the mountain range is thick with vegetation, including El Yunque, the only rain forest in US territory. At its most dramatic, the Cordillera Central rises sharply into jagged peaks that would exceed Mt. Everest in height, if measured from the ocean floor. From sea level, Puerto Rico's highest peak - Cerro de Punta - measures 4,389 feet.

Northeastern Puerto Rico is known as karst country, characterized by weird limestone formations and the thick, electric-green carpet of vegetation that covers them. Over the millions of years since Puerto Rico rose from the sea, rainwater has eroded the limestone rock into beehive-shaped mogotes, twisting caves, sinkholes, canyons and valleys. Occupying 617 square miles of karst country, the Río Camuy Cave Park is one of the largest networks of subterranean caverns, tunnels and rivers in the Western Hemisphere. Much of the cave system remains unexplored. On the south side of the island, the wide, arid coastal plains spread from the central mountains to the Caribbean Sea, and give way to an area of dry tropical forest in the southwest, characterized by blackish sands, spiny cacti and other gnarled desert plants. Mangroves and white sand beaches ring the island, and there are a number of rich coral growths. The southwest and southeastern capes rise from the sea in red cliffs. Puerto Rico is often referred to an island (including, for the sake of simplicity, in this book), which is technically inaccurate. It is an archipelago. Besides dozens of small cays, Puerto Rico includes four sizeable islands - Culebra and Vieques to the east and Isla Mona and Desecheo to the west.

Puerto Rico from space

History

In 1898 - the year the United States wrested Puerto Rico from Spain - American geologist Robert T. Hill observed that most of his fellow citizens knew less about the island than they do about even Japan or Madagascar. Though this situation has improved somewhat today, many Americans still know shockingly little about the Caribbean commonwealth that is joined at the hip to their country. It's too bad. The history of Puerto Rico - from Taino Eden to Spanish stronghold to potential US state - has helped shape the development of the New World, and reads like a novel. Check out the Bibliography at the end of this book for some great works of fiction and non-fiction about the island.

Long Before The Conquistadors...

Although human remains recently found on Vieques suggest humans may have been there as long ago as 1700 BC, little is known of the island's first inhabitants. The first identified human visitors to the main island of Puerto Rico were nomadic relatives of Native Americans to the north, known as Los Arcaicos, who most likely arrived during the first century on rafts. Apparently, they didn't stick around long enough to leave more than a few stone hatchets and other traces in a cave in the Loíza Aldea area east of San Juan. Two centuries later, an Arawak Indian group known as the Igneris showed up in giant canoes from what is now Venezuela. Adept at pottery and fishing, they settled a few coastal areas.

The group that left the most indelible and fascinating mark on the island, however, was the Tainos. Migrating north along the West Indies, they landed on Puerto Rico around AD 600, according to archeologists. Also of the Arawak group, they were better at agriculture and crafting tools than their Igneri predecessors and established a rich culture in Puerto Rico and Hispaniola that would last nearly 1,000 years. Most historians agree that the Tainos numbered about 30,000 in Puerto Rico when Christopher Columbus arrived in 1493. They called the island Borinquén - a word still used in various forms to designate the Puerto Rican land and people.

The God-Fearing Tainos

Taino village reconstruction at Tibes Indigenous Ceremonial Center

The Tainos were a relatively peaceful people who wore few or no clothes, practiced fishing and subsistence farming, and were devoutly spiritual. One of the first Spanish settlers to visit a Taino village described being amazed to see well-constructed houses of wood and straw, with walls of woven cane, surrounding a plaza. The village (empty because the residents apparently fled in terror at the sight of Spanish ships) was filled with gardens, and a well-made road led to the sea, where the natives had constructed a watchtower. This may have been a pleasure retreat for the village chief and his family, a fish-spotting platform or a guard post to warn against attacks by the fearsome Caribs, who at the time were their only enemies.

According to historical accounts written by the Spanish, the 15th century was a bad one for the Tainos. Shattering nearly 800 years of relative tranquility, the Caribs surged north from the Venezualan coast, spread through the Lesser Antilles, plundered Taino settlements and scattered their residents. By the time Columbus arrived, according to European chronicles, the Caribs had begun invading eastern Puerto Rico.

The Tainos were not great warriors, and tended to put their fate in the hands of deities, which they called cemíes, as well as a heavenly creator called Yocahú, a good god named Yukiyú and a number of lesser gods. They constantly prayed to fetishes made of wood, stone or seashells, which represented the cemíes. They used tobacco for mystical and medicinal purposes. Most were afraid to be alone in the dark of night, when the dead walked around in human form and could be distinguished from the living only by their lack of a navel. Each village was built around a plaza known as the batey - which served as ceremonial site, town hall and ballpark - where a soccer-like game between two teams was played as a religious ritual.

SUDDEN-DEATH SOCCER?

It is unknown if the Tainos practiced human sacrifice, offering the losers of their competitions to the gods as the Mayans did. But anthropologists agree that the matches were seen as a forum for the expression of divine will, and that the atmosphere at the games was deadly serious.

In what was probably the first anthropological study of the New World, a Catalonian friar named Ramón Pané lived with the Taino people for several years to study their customs and beliefs in order to begin converting them to Christianity. His report on Indian mythology, written in 1505, includes an uncanny prophecy. Sometime during the early 15th century, a great chief named Cazivaquel fasted for a week in order to communicate with the gods. When he emerged, he reported that a cemí had told him that upon his death, the new chief would rule only a short time, and that a clothed people would arrive and eventually rule the Tainos, killing many of them. The cemí also said that the remaining Tainos would die of hunger. At first, the Taino people believed the prophecy referred to the Caribs.