Old San Juan is a contrast of buildings, that somehow work perfectly together. It’s a walled city, with two massive fortresses dominating the coastline and the interior is a cozy city of pastel-colored buildings and blue cobblestone streets. Add in some thoughtful urban planning and you’ve got an amazing 500 year old city.
If you get on a boat in Spain (back in the days of yore), the trade winds will drop you right at the coast of Puerto Rico. Essentially this made it the natural pit-stop of the sailing era. Which also means that everyone wanted to own it. So, the Spanish spent hundreds of years building and then improving massive fortresses to keep the island in their possession. After being occupied by the Spanish military, then being used by the US military, the two forts are now part of the US National Parks service.
There’s no way around it, San Juan is Mrs-Snacks-hair-explodingly hot and humid. You need every patch of shade you can get. The Spanish knew this and planned for it in Old San Juan. They based the city’s grid system so that one side of the street would always have shade. They say the difference is 15 degrees between the sunny and shady sides. The perpendicular roads all have cooling ocean breezes. If you are thoughtful about how you walk through the city, you can maximize all of these tricks the urban planners put in 500 years ago.
The streets are lined with notable blue cobblestones. These are unique to Old San Juan and come from a specific area of England that had a foundry. The blue color you see is actually metal slag and does an impressive job of dealing with the water when a torrential downpour happens. There’s a warehouse that has (or had, I got differing answers) some spares, but mostly when you remove one you need to reuse it as they are not able to get more.
Unfortunately, not everything is perfect with these cobbles. They came in long after the city did, and were not planned for. Underneath the buildings are enormous cisterns which served as rain catchments for each homeowner. There is a system of tunnels under the roads that interconnect the cisterns which allow for overflow runoff to be moved away from the city to prevent flooding. After hundreds of years of unpaved roads, it was decided that they should be paved. However, adding the weight of these cobblestones has caused some of the tunnels to collapse since they were not engineered to support that weight.
Also interesting to learn, was that the beautiful colors of the buildings is not truly a part of their history. Until recently, the buildings were whitewashed only. However, in the mid-1900’s the US government decided that the building should be of pretty colors, as this is what survey results indicated tourists would want. Now, the colors of buildings are specified by the government and designed so you do not repeat colors near each other.
I can’t even begin to capture how interesting and complex the changes in this part of the city were. We took multiple tours with Andy from Puerto Rico Historic Buildings Drawings Society, and I think we barely scratched the surface of his knowledge. His day job is as an architect working with almost every building in the old city to understand and document the existing architecture of any building undergoing renovation by looking for original documentation and using technology to determine the construction details they don’t have documentation for. (It appears when Spain ceded Puerto Rico to the US they didn’t hand them a pile of blueprints for how they built each building…) If you are heading to San Juan, I would so highly recommend taking this tour early in your visit so you can truly appreciate the evolutions the city has gone through over its long history.
We were completely taken with this gorgeous city, and how complex its history is. It’s also notable that the things that have helped make its current image were not a part of the original plan—cobblestones and colored buildings.