cruise ship ports in san juan puerto rico map

Its role was to protect Spanish galleons laden with silver and gold taken from Mexico and Peru. Puerto Rico had no natural wealth to lure the Spaniards, but its strategic location on main Caribbean shipping lanes soon transformed San Juan into a fortress city. San Juan, to put things in perspective, was founded more than a century before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. Perhaps I should have been aware of Ponce de Leo'n's Puerto Rican connections, but the school texts of my day - and probably some even now - focused overwhelmingly on the Western Hemisphere's English heritage, all but ignoring Spain's important role. San Juan, now just a couple of decades shy of its 500th birthday, is wonderfully full of the drama of Spain's conquest of the New World, which like the footsteps of Ponce de Leo'n, invites exploring. It also was the family chapel of Ponce de Leo'n's descendants. His handsome statue - I was drawn to it from a distance to find out who it was who warranted such a prestigiously sited pedestal - commands the entrance to the charming little San Jose' Church, one of the very oldest churches in the Western Hemisphere.

His family's home for more than 250 years, the elegant Casa Blanca, has been exquisitely restored (as has much of Old San Juan) as a museum depicting the life of a prosperous man in the 16th and 17th centuries. He was appointed by the Spanish king as the Caribbean island's first governor in 1508, soon after it was discovered by Christopher Columbus, and he is buried in the city. Juan Ponce de Leo'n, as I subsequently learned, is an honored founding father of Puerto Rico. But in Old San Juan, the historically intriguing capital of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean's busiest cruise port, he seemed a rather heroic presence, standing - as he has for a great many years - in the lovely Plaza de San Jose'. My childhood schoolbooks had pictured him, as I recall, as a luckless, somewhat comical 16th-century Spanish explorer who had ventured into the wilderness of Florida in a futile search of a 'Fountain of Youth' - a sort of Don Quixote of the swamps, armor and all.

No one could have been further from my mind, and I didn't immediately recognize him - dressed as he was in armored vest and plumed hat under a hot afternoon sun. I bumped into Ponce de Leo'n the other day, quite by surprise.

Cruise ship ports in san juan puerto rico map