Conventional wisdom says there are two Puerto Ricos: San Juan and the villages spread across the island. Ponce proves those pundits wrong, delivering both town and country in an eccentric wrapper.This is the city where Latin American magical realism should have been born. It's a city of poets and musicians, artists and architects, intellectuals and statesmen. Here, on the southern coast of Puerto Rico, the newfangled flash and glitter that light up San Juan are kept -- gently, but firmly -- at arm's length. San Juan is imperious. San Juan is the commonwealth's political capital. But like second cities everywhere, Ponce adamantly refuses to stay in its sibling's shadow.
Ponce is a capital, too -- of criollismio. It counts itself the guardian of the Puerto Rican spirit. Made rich by sugar plantations in the late 19th century, it was so independent-minded that nearby Guánica was chosen as the landing site for the 1898 U.S. invasion that pried the island away from Spain. American generals concluded that Ponceos had no great love for the Spanish bureaucrats in San Juan who dictated their affairs. The generals were right. The townsfolk cheered as Spanish troops headed for the hills north of town after the landing.
Ponce is a place where you stroll beside 300-year-old silk cotton trees (ceibas) or beneath the manicured Indian laurels bordering the Plaza Las Delicias (Plaza of Delights) in the center of town, along narrow streets, including one flanked by two austere banks and called, incongruously, Callejon del Amor (Love Alley). It was recently renamed not for a pop icon or a sports figure, but for an employee who went to work at one of the banks as a janitor at age 15 and retired as general manager seven decades later. If San Juan is about capturing the moment, Ponce is about steadfastness; the two cities are the hare and the tortoise embodied in contrasting civic personas.
But if, like some Sanjuañeros, you pass Ponce off as staid, you'd be wrong. Serene, yes. Courtly, even reserved -- this is a city that minds its manners. But it's also eccentric. And more than eccentric, quirky. And a place where quirkiness is not just tolerated, it's a cherished civic virtue. Quirkiness like that of architect Blas Silva Boucher -- called the ''numerical man'' -- who, on the one hand, designed some of the most gracious homes on the island and who, on the other, named his daughters Silvia 1, Silvia 2 and Silvia 3.
Both the courtliness and the quirks are evident in Ponce's public face: its justly famed architecture.
The Plaza of Delights is ground zero for walking tours. Actually two plazas in one, it's dominated by statues -- Luis Muñoz Mar'n, the island's first elected governor for whom the San Juan airport is named, and the Fountain of the Lions. The fountain was purchased at the 1939 World's Fair in New York and placed here to commemorate citizens who saved Ponce in 1899. After the U.S. Army set up business in town, it established a munitions depot, which subsequently caught fire. Had flames reached the powder, the resulting blast would have leveled the city. U.S. troops ordered the town's fire department to let the fire burn -- it was too dangerous to fight -- but eight men ignored the order, containing the conflagration and saving the city. Grateful citizens declared that houses would be given to the city's firemen and that they and their descendants would live there, free and clear, forever. A fire, a fountain and free rent -- nothing startling there. But turning around, I come face to face with the peculiar side of Ponce: the bizarre red-and-black-striped Parque de Bombas, or firehouse. Built as part of an agricultural fair in 1882, it's now a firefighting museum complete with a restored antique engine.
The city has a reason to be paranoid about fires -- it has been wiped out repeatedly by flames. A disastrous fire in 1841 led to a series of building codes that laid the foundation for its current grandeur. Wooden structures were severely restricted, and buildings at intersections had to be constructed of stone and designed to present a façade, rather than a sharp corner, to the intersection. Any buildings that predated the codes had to be re-engineered to comply. At the landmark Wirshing house, this was accomplished by adding a rounded balcony and stucco ornaments, turning an ugly duckling neoclassical into a civic grace note.
By the time of the U.S. invasion, the city had come into its own economically, and there was money to spend on architectural ornamentation. Experi-mentation -- with Art Nouveau, Arts and Crafts and Oriental styles -- was the order of the day in the world's sophisticated cities and Ponce, where these styles were adapted to the tropics, was no exception. Transoms over doors, which aid air flow, became carved garlands and twining vines. Tiffanylike stained-glass windows and fantastic carved wooden screens separated living areas.
Many homes have been preserved as museums, and visitors can explore houses within the Ponce historic district where architects strained to integrate popular building styles into the traditional fabric of the city.
Two blocks west of the square on Calle Reina, the more restrained, but no less elegant, Weichers-Villaronga house features soaring ceilings braced by arches and columns, a trademark of its architect and original owner, Alfredo Weichers. The ceilings are ripe with flowing plaster ornaments, and up on the roof the gazebo must have been a fabulous playhouse for his daughters, Carmen and Amalia Rosa.
Educated in Barcelona and Paris, Weichers fled the island at the height of his career. His father, a German immigrant, had been the Prussian consul to Puerto Rico. With the U.S. firmly in control of the island and fighting Germany in World War I, Weichers was scrutinized and, he claimed, followed everywhere. Despite having designed homes for the wealthiest families in town, he packed up and, with his wife, Cambucha, moved to Barcelona in 1919.
Through work for his wealthy clients, however, Weichers managed to put his own face on much of his hometown before he left. The Serrallés family, owners of the Don Q distillery, was one of the wealthiest. They have two landmark homes here; Weichers designed the one in town, called Casa Serrallés, which houses the Museum of Puerto Rican Music. Painted a burnt sienna, it is a showplace with stained-glass windows, hand-painted floor tiles, carved mahogany louvers and soaring 12-foot ceilings covered with stamped tin panels. Here and there are touches of native Puerto Rican white and pink marble.
Across from the Casa Serrallés is one of Blas Silva Boucher's creations, Casa Salazar. Thumbing his nose at local superstitions, Boucher used snails and butterflies -- thought to bring bad luck -- in the decorative elements of the house. Finished in 1911, it features a gorgeous 4-foot rosette window in red and orange stained glass, placed high in the wall of the curiously small sitting room.
For a city of only 200,000, Ponce has an astonishing number of cultural institutions. In addition to the small museums in the historic houses, the city's art museum has the finest collection of traditional European art in the region, with an emphasis on pre-Raphaelite and Renaissance works, including some first-rate paintings by Velazquez, Gainesborough and Van Dyck. The building itself is appropriately unique, having been designed by Edward Durell Stone, who also designed the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Stunning polychromed, 18th-century statues representing Europe and America guard the entrance. Hexagonal skylights provide plenty of natural light to the galleries, which also include important works by Hispanic painters, such as Mexico's Diego Rivera and Puerto Rico's Jose Campeche and Francisco Oller.
Above town, the Serrallés family's other, grander residence, Castillo Serrallés preserves another sort of art: the living arts, with its lavish colonial style furnishings and baronial grounds.
There's only so much Gilded Age splendor my feet can handle, however, and I'm glad to make my way back to the plaza and a stop at King's for some tamarind ice cream. King's is as much a part of Ponce's history as the great houses -- and infinitely more refreshing. I thread my way out of the busy shop, with my confection held close for safety, to one of the plaza's shaded benches.
This is the perfect place to watch the sunset paint the pale-blue walls of the Catedral Nuestra Seora de Guadalupe and to think about a run down to La Guancha, a lively boardwalk along the Caribbean at the end of Avenida Malecon. The center of Ponce is compact, dense and urban. But not far from town, the concrete façades dissolve into the wild vegetation of the relatively uninhabited south coast. As sophisticated as the town core is, the outback feels untamed and unhurried. I'm headed west to the Copamarina Beach Resort, a half-hour drive from Ponce along Route 2, then south on Route 116, and finally on the narrow, barely two-lane Road 333 just past Gunica. The road hugs a mountainside along the coast. A sudden break in the arid scrub reveals a burst of brilliant bougainvillea in fuchsia, mandarin, burgundy and gold spilling over a fence at the entrance to Coparmarina's 20 lush acres. Low-key and made for lounging, the resort's two-story buildings huddle amid a grove of coconut palms backing a long, private beach. Straining my eyes in the gathering dark, I can see the silhouettes of long-tailed monkeys high in the palms, but their ears are jug-handle oval, and they aren't moving -- the tin cutouts another touch of south coast whimsy.
While the predominant form of entertainment here involves moving, slowly, from a hammock to the spa and back again, the attractions out here are of the natural variety.
The Guánica Dry Forest is a U.N. biosphere reserve and one of the finest dry subtropical forests in the world. The volcanic mountains that form the island's spine catch most of the rain before it gets here, leaving the south and the west in a rain shadow. Whereas ferns and undergrowth dominate in the east, out here the landscape is spattered with cactus. Of the dozen or so trails, Fuerte interests me most. For much of its 3-mile length it runs along a ridgetop; it's getting to the ridgetop that my body seems to find difficult. The spare landscape is nonetheless alive, and birds dot the sky: orange-cheeked waxbills, troupials and Puerto Rican nightjars. The ruins of an old fort make convenient condos for lizards. The effort pays off at trail's end with a short climb up the lookout tower. From here, the hilly landscape looks like a lumpy gray-green blanket sloping toward the Caribbean. I can see all the way to the water, and, hot and gravity-challenged at the top of my tower, I put snorkeling on the list for tomorrow.
From Guánica west to Cabo Rojo stretches one of the most astonishing -- and least known -- reefs in the Caribbean. Paralleling the 20 miles of coast is a vertical drop-off that rivals in size, formation and variety those in Cozumel and Cayman. If this wall were anywhere except Puerto Rico, dive boats would mob it. But Puerto Rico was bypassed by the scuba gold rush of the 1980s in favor of places perceived to be more exotic. And so it is that our little snorkel boat has a grand total of three people on board, and two of them are taking care of me. As we putter by, I can see that much of the shoreline is bulwarked with mangrove, whose knobby roots serve as a breeding ground for millions of tiny tropical fish.
And between the mangroves and the wall are patches of finger coral interspersed with groves of giant elkhorn colonies that serve as a halfway house for all these babies as they grow into their habitat on the outer reef. Whole clouds of creole wrasse and battalions of blackbar soldierfish sweep across the reef. Black coral, threatened by overharvesting elsewhere, is common at 60 or even 40 feet. By the time I get my mask in the water, I'm so relaxed that I almost forget to breathe.
Popping back up, sputtering, I spot a hill far in the distance. I think how short is the drive back to bustling San Juan, but how very far away I really am. And then I dive in again.
Posted online 02/20/02.
