[DAVID YETMAN] Puerto Rico is owned by the United States.

It is a US colony.

Its residents are U.S. citizens.

But it is as different from the Lower 48 as can be.

It is home to our largest colonial fortress, our only tropical rainforest, and the origin of some of our best music.

{LATIN MUSIC ENDS} [ANNOUNCER] Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Robert and Carol Dorsey, The Gilford Fund, Arch and Laura Brown, and Hugh and Joyce Bell.

[DAVID YETMAN] For more than a century, Puerto Rico has been part of the United States.

For most Americans, it is better known for residents who have migrated to the north than for its cities and countryside that are decidedly different from anything in the upper 48.

San Juan, the capital, sits on a northeastern side of the island.

It resembles more a Latin American city than an outlier of the United States.

Its landmark fortress, El Morro, sits atop a fortress wall, 500 years old.

{WAVES CRASH} It was begun in 1523 when the town was founded by Juan Ponce de Leon, who later would go to Florida.

The name Puerto Rico or “Porto” Rico means rich port.

It was one of the very few places where Spaniards found enough water that they could establish a colony.

Of course, later on they founded Cuba, by 1523, which is only two years after the conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards Tlaxcalans, there was a beginning of a Spanish fort city here in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

[TOUR GUIDE] San Juan is a 502 year old city, but it's really a 502 year old fortress.

This has always been the center of our military.

We were a completely walled city at one point.

We have many of our old fortifications still standing.

Have you ever heard a Puerto Rican call themselves a Boricua?

That was the original name of our island given to us by the Taino Indians.

They were here for thousands of years, and we know they came from South America because they had red clay in their pots, not native to the island of Puerto Rico.

Where we're standing is a place called Quincentennial Plaza, full of symbolism.

You're going to notice our handrails have five sides.

Our lanterns have five sides.

The top of the lamppost is meant to look like the diamond that King Ferdinand gave to Isabella.

And that is the first time that a man exchanged a diamond ring for marriage.

The tradition in the Spanish age of discovery is you name all newly found land after the patron saint of the day you found the land on.

That's why here in the Caribbean, we have all the saints, Saint Lucia, Saint Kitts, St Barts, Saint Martin, San Juan Bautista, Saint John the Baptist was our second name.

[DAVID] Okay.

El Morro is on top of the hill.

[TOUR GUIDE] This is one of our largest fortifications.

It was built to protect the bay.

It is a citadel that has never been taken.

We were a completely walled city for hundreds of years.

Four miles all the way around.

The Spaniards built 38 churches.

That's more than one every other block.

Of course, the Catholic Church, you make these big donations, the closer they bury you to the altar.

Right?

But we're limited on space, so they got the okay to start burying people in the walls of the churches.

In the 1800s, they moved our cemetery outside of the city wall.

The Spanish tradition is to whitewash their buildings.

So this is not from the Spanish tradition that we get these colorful buildings.

We developed this in the 1950s, and once again, it was Dr. Ricardo Alegria who developed the palette of 27 colors, tropical pastels.

[DAVID] For that alone, he should be sainted.

[TOUR GUIDE] You cannot have two of the same color next to each other or two of the same color on the same block.

So you have to meet with the municipality.

If you want to repaint your house and you have our beautiful blue cobblestones.

They officially decided to brick over the streets in 1891.

We don't really have a foundry here, so we purchased them.

We purchased them from Sunderland, England, right at the beginning of the Industrial Age.

They're made with a composite material in a hydraulic press.

They're coated with an iron slag which gives them the blue color and makes them very slippery when wet.

[DAVID] Well, they had plenty of slag in England, didn't they?

[TOUR GUIDE] You're not going to see blue cobblestones like this in the New World anywhere else.

This is the Cuban flag and this is the Puerto Rican flag up here.

We have the same flag.

Where theirs is red, ours is blue.

Where theirs is blue, ours is red.

Both of our flags were developed in the early 1890s by revolutionaries in New York who were no longer living on the island had already been exiled.

So in 1898, after the Spanish-American War, we were asked to relinquish any sort of national flag we had.

So here on the island, we didn't have a flag of our own.

We could only fly the United States flag for about 52 years.

Only two callejones in the city have stairs like this.

Our streets east to west are wider to allow for those trade winds to come into the town and ventilate the city.

Our streets north to south are narrower.

Those kind these callejones were built for that ventilation.

If we want to cool down-- [DAVID] Is that right?

That they were that sophisticated?

[TOUR GUIDE] If you want to cool down, get on one of these callejones and start walking north or south and you█ll cool off in the town.

So Christopher Columbus, of course, he brought us rats and then he brought us cats to take care of the rats.

[DAVID] Yeah.

and here they are.

They're still here.

{LAUGHTER} [TOUR GUIDE] But now we have a rather large cat population.

Well, this is one of our oldest streets.

So our dignitaries would enter through this ceremonial gate at the bottom there, and they would walk this street straight to the cathedral at the top of the hill here.

So look at this structure with me.

This is the Governor█s Mansion.

[DAVID] That█s where the governor actually lives?

[GUIDE] Yeah.

Palacio Santa Catalina.

Yes.

It's an executive mansion they live and work there, it is very much like the White House.

So we call these last Caritas in Spanish and they are our look outpost century stations.

But it was also a way that they sent messages along these old city walls.

The complete length of the walls when we were a completely enclosed city was four miles and in some places they're up to 100 feet high and the base is about 50 feet thick.

[DAVID] These tunnels are a later feature of the fort as the other European countries became more sophisticated in their attacks, the Spaniards responded by putting structures inside the fort that would enable them to move around in a way that you couldn't tell from the ocean.

The lone sentry here in the fort now is an iguana, but 250 years ago, there would have been a couple of thousands of actual soldiers.

At one point, at the end of the 18th century, the British attacked San Juan with a flotilla of 80 ships, and their cannon had become remarkably accurate for a basically hole through which round cannon ball was fired.

They managed to overrun the place using a lot of enforced labor, mercenaries, cannon fodder of young men.

But disease struck the British forces.

Once they had tried to settle in, they were forced to retreat.

The Spaniards were back in and smiled.

Welcome to San Juan.

The cannonballs were not just solid iron.

They were hollowed later, particularly, and filled with powder so that they would explode on contact so they could do a lot of damage.

The Spanish response was to build thicker walls and the thicker they got, the more they could absorb the attacks of the cannonballs.

They were at places 45 feet thick and over 40 feet tall.

And then the fort was inside “La Muralla”, the actual defensive structures at the edge and Spain until 1898 continued to control Puerto Rico.

As a result of the defeat of Spain in 1898, the United States got Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Philippines.

So it was not a great gain for Puerto Ricans.

But the U.S. gained, among other things, this fort.

And during World War Two, they used it for communications and strategic purposes, and they added their own structures on top, which aren't really as attractive as what the Spaniards built several hundred years ago.

Most of us in the upper 48 states aren't aware of the fact that the largest, most massive Spanish colonial defensive structure in the Americas is located in our country.

And thanks to the U.S. National Park Service, we can see it and know that it will be maintained as much as possible as it was 4 to 500 years ago.

[GUIDE] You know, hurricanes are a part of our history.

You know, those-- [DAVID] “Hurracán” is a Taino word.

[GUIDE] The Tainos had a God.

His name was Yaqui and he lived in our rainforest.

That's why they call it El Yunque.

And Yaqui protected the people.

He was the protector of the people.

And he protected them from the goddess of the winds.

And her name was Hurracán.

[DAVID] It's in this canal where the worst damage in the San Juan Harbor occurred.

There are other parts of the island that got it worse.

But in here, the wind was actually funneled into this channel.

You can see the shore here.

There's still the detritus from all of the damage washed up.

What did you hear about how many people died?

[YORMAN SIERRA] Like 3000.

[DAVID] 3000?

Do you remember how heavy the winds were?

[YORMAN] Almost 200.

[DAVID] Oh, my God.

200 miles an hour.

Yeah.

[YORMAN] It was a hurricane category 5.

[DAVID] No water except from your pool?

No electricity, no refrigerator.

My goodness.

I've heard there's shipwrecks.

Are there some of those?

[YORMAN] That one over there.

You can see that one over there behind us, that was the hurricane.

{SALSA MUSIC SWELLS} [DAVID] The neighborhood called Santurce is located quite close to old San Juan.

Until the late 20th century, it was a derelict place close to a slum.

But some local artists, some very well known artists, decided to change things.

They put their work together and started murals.

And the murals today are a wonder of Puerto Rico and an attraction for people from all over the world.

This is an artist's conception of a Taino woman.

The Tainos were a sophisticated culture that existed in Puerto Rico before the arrival of Spaniards.

They were a highly developed community with organized towns and organized political system.

They unfortunately were attacked by Carabs from the south.

And when the Spaniards arrived, there was fierce fighting going on between the Tainos and the Carabs, and the Spaniards took advantage of that.

And the Tainos are no more.

[BETO APONTE] {SPEAKING SPANISH} [TRANSLATION] This is the famous “Calle Serra” {SPEAKING SPANISH} There's hardware stores, antique shops, shoe stores all from the sixties and seventies.

{SPEAKING SPANISH} And it's become really busy.

It's now a booming tourist destination of the global level.

{SPEAKING SPANISH} This mural is the face of a very famous salsa singer, one of the best salsa singers of all time.

And this is the Puerto Rican flag now.

{SPEAKING SPANISH} The murals you see on this street in the next street, Calle Monserrate, t's all for the world to see.

Puerto Rico is for the world.

{SPEAKING SPANISH} Everything is great here.

There are no complaints.

Like they say, it's the port most visited.

{SPEAKING SPANISH} [DAVID] Calle Cerra isn't just an artist's dream.

It's a living neighborhood.

In the middle of the art of Santurce, here we see here a gentleman wearing a cap, saying “Brooklyn,” which is a reminder of the very close ties that exist between Puerto Rico and New York City.

Even the ticket booth to a parking lot has a painted surface from all kinds of designs on it.

The artists go crazy here with good reason, but you have to be careful to walk both ways, because if you don't, you'll miss the ones from the other direction.

There's a wide variety of expression.

Some of it is just purely artistic expression and the range goes to deeply political expression, but all of it combines into one whole that gives you an overwhelming feeling of art.

[GUANINA COTO] {SPEAKING SPANISH} [TRANSLATION] I'm painting a mural that represents the song, “Besos en Invierno.” {SPEAKING SPANISH} This figure here is moving away because the song is about a couple who's breaking up.

{SPEAKING SPANISH} [DAVID] But once the artist began their work and got permission from owners to paint murals on their walls, they probably saw that it was an improvement on the neighborhood and an improvement to business.

{BOMBA MUSIC CRESCENDOS} La Bomba music has very old roots in Puerto Rico.

Another native Puerto Rican sound.

Puerto Rican music has influenced the entire world of music.

{BOMBA SINGERS HARMONIZE} [MINIR CASSANOVA] {SPEAKING SPANISH} [TRANSLATION] The whole world has different ways of defining La Bomba.

For me, it's an expression that emerges through music as a result of the unjust enslavement of many people.

They didn't have a common language to speak, so they managed to communicate through this language, the language of the drums.

{SPEAKING SPANISH} {LA BOMBA MUSIC CONTINUES} It█s a musical language.

It became a space to express pain, express happiness, express blessings, rebellions.

They used it as a medium for expression.

And through the centuries, we have maintained the same resistance in different ways, but always resisting.

{SPEAKING SPANISH} It's our way of healing.

{BOMBA SINGER CONTINUES} [DAVID] I'm in the middle of El Yunque National Forest.

Like every national forest in the United States, it's administered by the United States Department of Agriculture.

It's sort of like the national park.

But it is most unusual because it is the only tropical rainforest in the United States.

All of us in the upper 48 read of the hurricanes that devastated Puerto Rico in 2017, Hurricane Irma, and then only a couple of months later, the worst hurricane Maria, and knocked out the electrical grid for months in some places as much to a year.

What we didn't read was the destruction it caused in El Yunque National Forest.

It destroyed many of the great trees, hundreds of years old.

But because this place gets about 240 inches of rain a year, it bounces back very quickly.

One distinguishing feature of a tropical rainforest and this in particular, is the hundreds of shades of green.

It's not just the emerald forests, but it's a thousand different shades of emerald.

{BRASS LATIN INSTRUMENTS PLAY} One of the remarkable features is the forest of tree ferns.

We think of ferns as low lying growth, but these ferns grow into trees 15 to 20 feet tall.

The heavy rainfall here is due to the fact that the moist air masses moving across the island rise suddenly, that cooling that it produces condenses rain.

The highest point in El Yunque is only about 3500 feet.

There are other ranges that are even higher, but none of them get over 5000 feet high.

Still, when you have a relatively small island, a mile-high mountain is pretty significant.

{COMFORTING ACOUSTIC GUITAR} The tree ferns look like something out of Jurassic times.

As a matter of fact, they are.

They were covering large portions of Earth long before there were flowering plants.

They would not be along for another 100 million years or so.

{WAVES CRASH, SEAGULLS CALL} More and more people nationally, U.S. and internationally are discovering the Puerto Rico has almost unending supply of beaches, placid beaches that are full, sometimes on holidays.

But for much of the year, awaiting people who want to see the wonders of skin diving, of scuba diving or swimming and picnicking on their own beach.

{UNDERWATER SOUNDS} Ponce {COMFORTING ACOUSTIC GUITAR} {UNDERWATER SOUNDS} {POLICE WHISTLE, CITY AMBIENCE} Ponce is Puerto Rico's second largest city.

It's on the south side of the island, whereas San Juan is on the north side of the island.

Ponce sits on the Caribbean Sea.

San Juan is on the Atlantic, and the two cities could not be more different.

San Juan is a bustling economic powerhouse with international trade, high rise condos and the bustling place of economic energy.

Ponce, on the other hand, is reminiscent of a plantation economy from the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Bananas, coffee, sugarcane, low cost products that made their owners immensely rich.

They took that money and built lovely homes here in Ponce, and the difference is still outstanding.

This very curious looking building called the Parque de Bombas was actually constructed in the late 19th century for a national exhibition, but shortly after that it became the city's fire station.

“Bomba” is the word in Spanish for pump and “bomberos” are firefighters who pump the water.

Inside, this building now is a museum that is nationally famous.

You find all sorts of firefighting memorabilia.

{BOSSANOVA TUNE} Ponce was named after Juan Ponce de Leon, who was a major factor in the founding of the colony of Puerto Rico, went on to Florida, got sick, came back and died in Cuba.

The town, the city of Ponce is so different from San Juan, you can hardly imagine a greater difference.

You can look far and wide in San Juan trying to find a central plaza.

It's much more Spanish in its appearance than San Juan appears to be.

It's a very Hispanic city.

{SALSA MUSIC STARTS} Puerto Rico's climate is tropical for the most part, but it has a surprising variety of climates that give rise to some strange and I think wonderful vegetation Here on the south coast, we run into what we call tropical deciduous forests, dry tropical forests.

I've seen this in a lot of places, but almost all of them are on the West coast of Mexico.

And here we are on the south coast of Puerto Rico, seeing some very unusual plants, which makes me think I don't quite know where I am.

It's hard to believe, but this is a prickly pear cactus.

It's a tree, prickly pear.

And the only other place I've seen them like this is in the Galapagos Islands off Ecuador.

To the left is a burserus tree.

It's a member of the frankincense family.

It's not like your typical rainforest where it's green all year round, and the trees then will drop their leaves in response to drought so that they don't waste all of that energy maintaining their leaves.

{ENERGETIC SALSA CONTINUES} When the rains come again, they'll leaf out and start the whole cycle over, probably in 4 to 5 months.

{ENERGETIC SALSA CONTINUES} So this very hard rock and what I see along the coast, which was once probably tens of thousands of feet deep in the ocean, has been actually lifted up by this clash, this war of the tectonic plates that make for such great action on our planet.

{WAVES CRASH} From time to time along this beach area, you will find nice portions of sand.

It probably wash down from a river not far away.

And the waves swept it over here.

But as I look further behind me, I can see that there are little cliffs that form in the limestone.

And ultimately those cliffs will be undercut by the waves and chunks will fall off, giving it no real opportunity to build up the kind of beach we like to sit in the sand.

Puerto Rico is an island.

Nowhere in the island is very far from the sea.

And the sea is warm and Puerto Rico is tropical, which means that other Americans can come to this part of the Americas of the United States relatively easy.

Many of them come just to see the beaches.

But there is a lot more to Puerto Rico than just beaches.

Natural wonders, ocean rich in Marine life, a cultural heritage, and a historical heritage that nowhere else in the United States can match {LATIN MUSIC CONCLUDES} Join us next time In the Americas with me, David Yetman.

The geographical center of Brazil is quite different from the fabled rainforests of the Amazon.

Its ultramodern capital grew from precise architectural design.

Nearby is a world class source of crystals and towering above all, is a vast plateau that delivers bountiful waters to the plains and people below.

{SPEAKING PORTUGUESE} The flags blowing in the wind are to the right, of course, the U.S. flag, and in the middle, the Puerto Rican flag, and to the left, it's called the Burgundy flag.

At the time of the construction of the Fort, Europe was a geographical mishmash, and Burgundy was part of Castile or Spain.

And this flag then was created by the King to represent Burgundy.

So it's called the flag of Burgundy.

It probably changed many times over the next few hundred years.

[ANNOUNCER] Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Robert and Carol Dorsey, The Gilford Fund, Arch and Laura Brown, and Hugh and Joyce Bell.