Guanica

Guánica marks where empires changed hands and where the driest forest meets the wettest. On August 12, 1508, Juan Ponce de León landed in Guánica harbor and founded Guaynía—considered the first capital of Puerto Rico. The 1511 indigenous uprising destroyed it. Spanish settlement moved elsewhere, but the harbor remained strategically significant.

On July 25, 1898, that significance proved decisive. General Nelson A. Miles had planned to invade via Fajardo in the northeast. Approaching the Mona Passage, he changed course and landed 16,000 U.S. troops at Guánica instead. The auxiliary gunboat Gloucester—formerly industrialist J.P. Morgan's yacht Corsair—arrived first, surprising Spanish defenders. Lieutenant Méndez López and Puerto Rican militia opened fire; Americans responded with machine guns and naval bombardment. The first land skirmish of the Puerto Rico campaign forced the militia's retreat to Yauco. A young poet named Carl Sandburg served among the American forces. By December 10, 1898, Spain ceded Puerto Rico to the United States. July 25 became Occupation Day, later renamed Constitution Day. The Guánica Rock—a coral boulder on the waterfront—commemorates the landing.

The 18th and 19th centuries had transformed the region through sugar. Plantations cleared large areas of forest; African slaves worked the labor-intensive cultivation. But Guánica's ecological distinction lies in what survived clearance: the Guánica Dry Forest. The Cordillera Central mountain ridge creates a rain shadow. While the northeast receives over 100 inches of precipitation annually, Guánica gets less than 30—some areas as little as six. This created the world's largest remaining tropical dry coastal forest.

The Guánica State Forest, established in 1919 and designated an international Biosphere Reserve in 1981, covers 9,500 acres with 36 miles of trails through four forest types: deciduous trees, coastal regions with tree-sized milkweed and nine-foot prickly pear cacti, mahogany stands, and twisted gumbo limbo trees. Approximately 700 plant varieties thrive here. The forest hosts Puerto Rico's greatest bird diversity, including rare species thought extinct elsewhere: the Puerto Rican lizard cuckoo, nightjar, woodpecker, and emerald hummingbird.

By 2026, Guánica embodies two transformations: the political (from Spanish to American sovereignty, enacted on its beaches) and the ecological (from sugar plantation to biosphere reserve, demonstrating how cleared forest regenerates when exploitation stops). The driest corner of a wet island became a world treasure precisely because its aridity made it economically marginal.