Old San Juan - A Graceful Old Lady

This has to be one of the most charming Old Towns I've ever been to.

I won't say "the best" because I know there's a lot of competition for that title. For starters, Stockholm's Gamla Stan is a great one, Prague also is enchanting. But it's been a long time since I've been to Stockholm and time being a fickle thing, has blurred it in my memory. And Prague? Beautiful, yes, but for me, she's a bit too exuberant; too many architectural styles competing for attention crammed together. It's also not so well maintained. Madrid, the capital of the colonial homeland, didn't hold a candle to Old San Juan either, though that's more of what I had expected when I went there. And sure, there's plenty of other old towns I haven't been to yet, but something about this old town has just me won over.

It's the profusion of colour abounding in Old San Juan that initially sucks you in, and the clean-cut architecture. The buildings aren't particularly intricate, but their simple design and bold colours are striking. There are a handful of lavish buildings that are majestic and tastefully done. Other than that, only now and then is there a hint of ornateness in the window trim or the balcony to set it off. Most buildings are only 2 or 3 stories high but they still seem to loom above you. Matched with the opaque blue cobblestone streets, winding down the steep hilly slopes in a mirage of colour it produces an Alice-in-Wonderland type awe. You turn a corner expecting to find the hide of the white rabbit dashing around the next corner.

Of course the magic of this city lies also in it's deep history. It's some 460 years old and is the second oldest European city in the Americas. It still contains a large portion of the wall that once surrounded the entire city.  It's 7-square-block area has evolved into a charming residential and commercial district including more than 400 carefully restored 16th- and 17th-century Spanish colonial buildings which are accented by parks, plazas, churches and 2 forts at either end of the city. A wise visionary back in the 1940s cautioned the government against modernising the district. The preservation of these buildings and laws requiring new buildings to incorporate the same architectural elements has allowed this city to flourish into the 21st Century. It was declared a world heritage site in 1983.

(Left: The cobblestones are adoquine, a blue stone cast from furnace slag; they were brought over as ballast on Spanish ships and time and moisture have lent them their characteristic colour)
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Old San Juan was built at the far west end of a small, narrow island in the bay of San Juan, commanding the entrance to the harbour. It wasn't till the end of the 19th century that the city even expanded outside it's walls, when the east side of the wall was removed to incorporate Puerta de Tierra, the rest of this tiny island (now housing most of Puerto Rico's government institutions, including the Capitol and Supreme Court). The metropolis of San Juan is now a large gritty sprawl like any urban city with a large low socio-economic demographic and roughly half the island's population living in this area.


The grey building closest on the left has the garden

  

We had the good fortune of staying right in the middle of Old San Juan with a couchsurfer named Ali who is now also a good friend. He had a cute, tiny aparment on the top floor (3rd floor). It had high ceilings, and proportionate-sized doors and windows. Wooden doors containing levered shutters opened up to slight balconies, and even the main door had the same type doors with no glass or gauze, just straight out to the elements. It made for a nice cross-breeze but was trouble when it rained hard! Directly opposite us across the street,the top floor contained just the facade of the building below, and through hollow windows you could see plants growing and strings of vines folding out down the edge of the window panes. It looked fantastical. But actually it was really a mid-city vegetable garden; a kind of coop garden for kids to grow their own vegetables. Wow, I thought, what a progressive idea in an age-old city.

We felt remarkably safe in this city - though admittedly it was the tourist area - but we wanted to find out what the locals had to say. Our constant questions of "is San Juan safe" were always met with a mention of La Perla, the slum area on the rocky north coast of the city wall. Ali, our couchsurfing host and a native Puerto Rican said that this area developed during a time when the workers, slaves and non-white servants lived outside the city walls. They would be let in to work during the day and thrown out in the evening, and there, by the side of the wall, their settlement grew. It is still an ad-hoc village housing the outcasts of society, now synonomous with drug trafficking and crime. It is the only place that is off-limits in San Juan, and the rumour is that not even Police will go in.

Arguably one might say we didn't see the real San Juan, and no, we probably didn't really. We hardly ventured outside the walls except to arrive and leave! Yet we saw the San Juan of yesterday, the one that tells it's story and captures it's essence, the San Juan that lingers in peoples memories. We also had some unique experiences thanks to our host, Ali, who among other things, introduced us to some local haunts, and those I will tell you about in the next post.

Aerial view of La Perla (from Wikipedia)