Puerto Rico

self-governing island commonwealth of the West Indies, associated with the United States. The main island lies approximately 50 miles (80 kilometres) from the island of Hispaniola to the west and roughly 40 miles from the Virgin Islands to the east. The U.S. mainland lies about 1,000 miles to the northwest. Puerto Rico covers an area of 3,515 square miles (9,104 square kilometres), including offshore islands. It has a mountainous tropical ecosystem with very little flat land and few mineral resources; it also has a rapidly growing population. The capital is San Juan.

Christopher Columbus discovered the island in 1493. Under Spanish authority from that time until 1898, Puerto Rico's lack of resources resulted in neglect and minimal investment by the Spanish. San Juan, however, has one of the best harbours in the Caribbean, and the Spanish built fortifications to protect this asset for their vital oceanic trade routes. When the United States acquired Puerto Rico in 1898 as a result of the Spanish-American War, it found itself in control of a poor island whose inhabitants were mostly involved in small-scale agriculture. The social system at that time was Spanish and conservative; the people were mostly rural, poor, uneducated, Roman Catholic, and resistant to change. The sudden intrusion of capitalistic ideas and values assured a high degree of social and cultural conflict.

Modern Puerto Rico is generally well-off by Latin-American standards. Beginning in the 1940s, a political coalition between the Puerto Rican leader Luis Muñoz Marín and the U.S.-appointed governor, Rexford Guy Tugwell, was forged to promote a self-help program, called "Operation Bootstrap," of economic development and social welfare. In a little more than four decades, much of the territory's crushing poverty was eliminated. This was done partly through emphasis on the development of manufacturing and service industries, the latter related to an enormous growth in tourism. Improvements have been made largely with the cooperation of the United States, but relationships with that country have also become a focal point of political turmoil. Various factions have bitterly disputed the political status of the island, and, although a majority voted to retain its commonwealth relationships, strong minorities have continued to push for statehood or--at times with violence--independence.

Puerto Rico's mountainous backbone is the easternmost extension of a tightly folded and faulted ridge that extends from the Central American mainland across the northern Caribbean to the Lesser Antilles. While the highest point on the island reaches only about 4,389 feet (1,338 metres) at Mount Punta, there is a marine trough north of San Juan that plunges to more than 30,000 feet (9,144 metres) below sea level, one of the lowest ocean depths. The great difference in crustal elevations illustrates the strong tectonic forces that have operated in geologic history to create these features. Puerto Rico still occasionally suffers from earthquakes, reflecting the ongoing geologic processes. Rectangularly shaped, the island measures, at most, only about 111 miles from east to west and a mere 40 miles from north to south. Two important islands off the east coast, Vieques and Culebra, are also parts of Puerto Rico, as is the island of Mona to the west.

Most of Puerto Rico is either mountainous or hilly terrain, with nearly a fourth of the island composed of steep slopes that inhibit agriculture and increase building costs. The highest mountain range, the Central Cordillera, with altitudes exceeding 3,000 feet, trends east-west and is located off-centre, closer to the south coast. Slopes rise abruptly from the south coast to the highest peaks and descend more gently toward the north. The Caguas Basin is the largest of several basins in the mountains that provide level land for settlements and agriculture. There is a continuous but narrow lowland along the north coast. Most people live along the coastal lowlands, and migration from the mountainous rural areas to the coastal cities continues to empty out the island's interior.

The first inhabitants of Puerto Rico, probably from the Florida Peninsula, reached the island more than 1,000 years before the arrival of the Spanish. These primitive inhabitants collected food from the seashore and wild fruit from the land. By the year AD 1000 Arawak Indians, who developed the Taino culture, had arrived by way of the Lesser Antilles from the tropical forests of South America. The Arawak, living in small villages, were organized in clans and led by a cacique, or chief. They were a peaceful people who, with a limited knowledge of agriculture, lived on such domesticated tropical crops as pineapples, cassava, and sweet potatoes supplemented by seafood. Anthropologists estimate their numbers to have been between 20,000 and 50,000. On a fertile island the Arawak lived an easy life disturbed only by occasional visits from their Carib neighbours on the islands to the south and east. At the time of discovery, Carib Indians occupied most of the Lesser Antilles, the Virgin Islands, and Vieques Island.

In 1493 Christopher Columbus left Spain on his second voyage to the Indies with an elaborate expedition of 17 ships and about 1,500 men. At the island of Guadeloupe the Spaniards rescued several Arawak Indians who had been taken from Boriquén, the Indian name for Puerto Rico, by the Caribs. Columbus agreed to return them to their island, and on Nov. 19, 1493, the expedition anchored in a bay on the west coast of Puerto Rico. Columbus formally took possession of the island in the name of Ferdinand and Isabella, the rulers of Spain, and named it San Juan Bautista. Two days were spent on the island before the ships moved westward to Hispaniola, where the first settlement in the New World was established.

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San Juan,