Maricao

Maricao exists because hiding was once possible here. Known as 'El Pueblo de las Indieras'—Town of Indian Settlements—the remote western Cordillera Central became a refuge for Taínos escaping Spanish colonization. The mountains that protected indigenous survivors later attracted a different wave of refugees: Corsican immigrants who arrived after 1815 and transformed these slopes into coffee country.

By 1877, Puerto Rico had 843 registered coffee haciendas—234 of them in Maricao alone, more than any other municipality. The Corsican influence created what many consider the island's finest coffee. In 1899, the Sucesión Espinosa family from Maricao's Bucarabones ward entered Barcelona's international agricultural fair and won first prize for coffee quality, defeating over twenty countries. For a brief window, this tiny mountain municipality was the capital of Caribbean coffee excellence.

Then the market collapsed. The 20th century brought cheaper production elsewhere, US tariff policies that favored other crops, and hurricanes that devastated the delicate coffee trees. What remains is Puerto Rico's second-least populous municipality—4,455 people in 2020, down from 6,449 in 2000—surrounded by the 10,000-acre Maricao State Forest and its fish hatchery raising 25,000 fish annually for island lakes.

A single factory, Fenwal Blood Technologies, manufactures transfusion equipment. Eco-tourism draws birdwatchers to one of Puerto Rico's most biodiverse forests. But the pattern is clear: Maricao thrives when the outside world can't reach it, and declines when global markets determine what mountain agriculture is worth. By 2026, the question is whether gourmet coffee's revival or forest tourism reverses the exodus, or whether Maricao continues its long retreat toward becoming a nature preserve with a few remaining residents.