Nights are special here, and moonless ones are incandescent-definitely memorable. Somnolent by day, La Parguera-a straggling fishing village on Puerto Rico`s southwest coast-comes alive at sundown.
After a day on the water, fishing boats return to port to unload catches or land parties of sunburned sportsmen and their hard-won trophies. Visitors and residents alike drift toward the waterfront to begin an informal paseo, or promenade, that lasts well into the night. Village restaurants-most unpretentious, facing the sea and specializing in mariscos, seafood-open their doors. Around the small dockside plaza outdoor stalls, cheerfully festooned with Christmas lights year round, sell raw oysters, fried clams and cooked shrimp.
The warm, moist night is scented with a compounded aroma of salt, mimosa, mangrove and fried fish. From the open doors of bars and the ubiquitous transistor radios of vendors blare pulsing, compatible variations on salsa themes, compelling music that rings across the water and seems to echo from the black velvet canopy of the tropical sky.
When the last embers of daylight have faded and darkness is total, sightseeing boats of various sizes-from putt-putting runabouts to twin-decked excursion vessels-start sailing out through a chain of tiny offshore islands to Phosphorescent Bay, the marine phenomenon that makes La Parguera unique among Puerto Rican fishing villages. One of the largest such phosphorescent bays, the one at La Parguera is considered by many knowledgeable people to be the finest.
The phosphorescence is the result of a concentration of billions of microorganisms bearing the scientific name pyrodinium bahamense. There are similar concentrations elsewhere in the world-including the Bahamas, where they were first identified-but the microorganisms flourish especially well in the warm, shallow waters off La Parguera.
Pool of quicksilver
On cloudy or moonless nights, when there is no other light source to distract from the shimmer of the interacting organisms, the bay is a pool of quicksilver. The wakes of boats glow whitely, and even the slightest breeze makes rippling patterns of light on the water`s surface. Boat captains usually haul a couple of buckets aboard for their passengers` entertainment: A hand thrust into a bucket of bay water produces a startling effect-when touched, the water shatters into shards of light, like a broken mirror.
Weekends and moonless nights, boats usually make two trips a night from La Parguera to Phospherescent Bay. The round trip takes about two hours. The charge is $2-$3 per person.
La Parguera is hardly undiscovered but neither is it highly developed. There are no high rises, little neon and many ramshackle buildings on stilts over the water. The village is a popular weekend retreat for San Juan residents and draws a trickle of off-island visitors. To serve this modest tourist influx-mostly local, Spanish-speaking and seeking inexpensive antidotes to urban stress-there are a number of modest restaurants and small hotels as well as a commercial campground; most of those are strung out along the waterfront.
Decor is pretty basic in most La Parguera eating places, but the service at popular bistros such as La Casita de Mariscos or the dining room of Parador La Parguera is friendly and the fresh-caught seafood superb. Menus generally feature lobster tails, red snapper, shrimp, oysters, mussels, conch and asopao, a spicy fish stew that is the local equivalent of bouillabaisse. Like other full-course meals in Puerto Rico, a seafood lunch or dinner is often accompanied by a bowl of black soup and a mound of yellow rice. Sorullos, a kind of corn fritter, are a south coast specialty usually served with fish. The wine of the country is beer, served just a couple of degrees above freezing.
The two biggest La Parguera hostelries, Villa Parguera and Villa Porlamar, are paradores; that is, they are part of a government-sponsored system of locally owned inns. Villa Parguera is the larger of the two and has the most amenities, including a swimming pool and a restaurant. The parador`s dining room is also a member of Mesones Gastronomicos, an association of two dozen restaurants specializing in authentic Puerto Rican cuisine.
The cosmopolites of San Juan, where about a third of Puerto Rico`s population lives, usually refer to the rest of the commonwealth simply and airily as La Isla-The Island-the implication being that everything outside the capital, or out-island, is profoundly somewhere else. In the psychological sense, as La Parguera demonstrates, this is unquestionably true.
From stress to serenity
A drive on the trans-island freeway, Route 52, from the bustle of the capital in the northwest to the slow-paced southwest coast is a scenic journey through the heart of Puerto Rico, but also a mind trip from stress to serenity. The highway passes through the extensive industrial outskirts of San Juan, but also by fields of sugar cane, past rural villages, across a rolling emerald landscape and over the cordillera central: the mountain spine of Puerto Rico that rises to 4,300 feet.
The cordillera is the home and redoubt of the jibaro, the hardy mountaineer who has as honored a place in the Puerto Rican national myth as the cowboy does in the American one. There aren`t as many jibaros as there used to be-most hardscrabble mountain farms have been abandoned-but the breed still exists, the legend lives on.
A heroic limestone statue of an idealized jibaro stands in a scenic overlook surrounded by volcanic peaks at Route 52`s highest point: a pass through the cordillera near Caguas. The statue is frequently visited by respectful motorists, many doubtless the urbanized sons and daughters of real life jibaros; also stopping by are keen-eyed photographers looking for a panoramic view of the island`s rugged interior.
From the ridge of the cordillera, the long view south on Route 52 is over a tumbling volcanic countryside to the bright blue ribbon of the Caribbean. This is La Isla.
The unofficial capital of La Isla is Ponce, Puerto Rico`s second-largest city and principal Caribbean port. Ponce has 200,000 inhabitants and is surrounded by a belt of mostly light industry; but somehow ”The Pearl of the South” retains the feeling of the unhurried but dignified country town it was for much of its history.
Plaza is heart of Ponce
As with most Spanish colonial towns, the heart of Ponce is a large square, Plaza Central. One of the nicest such colonial plazas to be found anywhere in The Americas, Ponce`s is so thickly planted with huge fig trees and flowering bushes and shrubs that it is also called Plaza Las Delicias:
”The Plaza of Delights.” Such shade is welcome in sunny Ponce, which-because of the storm-stopping wall of the cordillera central behind it-has fewer cloudy days and less rain than elsewhere in Puerto Rico. Crop-conscious jibaros may think otherwise, but most tourists rate Ponce`s climate the best in Puerto Rico.
There is a bandstand in the plaza. Also, a statue of Juan Morell Campos, a gifted native son who composed many popular dance tunes-and dropped dead while performing one of them. As is customary in Latin America, the cathedral- an imposing but much-rebuilt church dedicated to Our Lady of Guadeloupe-is also in the plaza.
Downtown Ponce`s best-known building, however, is the impossible-to-miss and much-photographed Parque de Bombas – the firehouse. Gaudily painted in broad red-and-black stripes, the firehouse was erected in 1882 as the main pavilion of an agricultural fair. It is now Ponce`s symbol structure, local equivalent of Paris` Eiffel Tower or New York`s Statue of Liberty.
A number of well-preserved examples of gracious, late-colonial architecture stand near the plaza. The city hall, recently restored, is suitably official-looking with a landmark clock tower and two Spanish-hacienda style courtyards. And to the west of the plaza is the tropical Victorian Armstrong-Porventud residence, long owned by one of Ponce`s leading merchant families and now housing the local office of the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture.
Not on the plaza, but the city`s cultural heart, is the Ponce Museum of Art: finest art museum in the Caribbean. A long, graceful two-story building designed by Edward Durrell Stone, architect of New York`s Museum of Modern Art, the museum stands at the edge of town, across from the campus of Catholic University.
The museum was the creation of Luis A. Ferre, a wealthy manufacturer and former governor of Puerto Rico. The collection includes the works of some of the great names in art-Rubens, Van Dyck, Cranach, Velazquez, Murillo and Courbet among others-but reflecting Ferre`s typically Latin American romantic tastes, it has one of the hemisphere`s largest collections of 19th-century Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Long out of vogue, the Pre-Raphaelites are coming back into fashion: Ponce Museum polls show the most popular painting with visitors is Lord Frederick Leighton`s lushly romantic ”Flaming June.”
Perhaps because of its fine climate, the southwest was one of the first parts of Puerto Rico to be permanently inhabited. At Tibes, just outside Ponce, a village of the pre-Columbian Taino Indians, the island`s original inhabitants, has been excavated and partly reconstructed. Discovered artifacts-tools, pottery, ceremonial masks, etc.-are displayed in a small museum, which also shows a film about these first Puerto Ricans.
La Parguera is about 25 miles west of Ponce, via a scenic road that hugs the soft, tranquilizing Caribbean-washed coast for most of the way. Very out- island.
