Rich Port was Columbus’s San Juan Bautista first
Puerto Rico, a U.S. unincorporated commonwealth about 1,600 kilometres southeast of Miami, sits between the Dominican Republic and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Indigenous Ortoiroid, Saladoid, and Taíno peoples settled it two to four thousand years ago; Columbus claimed it for Spain in 1493, and Ponce de León colonized in 1508.
Spanish for rich port, the island is also called Boricua after the Indigenous Boriquen, popularly glossed as Land of the Valiant Lord, and in Spanish it is nicknamed La Isla del Encanto. Columbus called the island San Juan Bautista while its main town was Ciudad de Puerto Rico; traders later swapped the names, so the island became Puerto Rico and the capital San Juan.
The first inhabitants were Ortoiroid hunter-gatherers without pottery, possibly present around 4,000 years ago. Between about 500 and 200 BC Saladoid migrants from the Orinoco basin brought farming and ceramics, and genetic evidence suggests their ancestry came to dominate the later Ceramic Age peoples who became the Taíno. Disease, forced labour under Spanish settlers and war cut Taíno numbers sharply during the sixteenth century, and the island served as a major Spanish military post through centuries of European rivalry.
After the 1898 Treaty of Paris the United States anglicised the name to Porto Rico until Félix Córdova Dávila’s 1931 joint resolution restored the original. Luis Muñoz Marín’s Estado Libre Asociado arrangement, rendered in English as Commonwealth, took effect on 25 July 1952, and critics still call the wording euphemistic.
Islanders have held U.S. citizenship since 1917 and can move freely to the mainland, yet they cannot vote in federal elections, and a nonvoting resident commissioner represents them in Congress. They pay various taxes, though most income earned on the island escapes federal income tax. Mid-century industrialisation built what the IMF classes as a developed economy, led by pharmaceuticals and manufacturing and ranked 47th on the Human Development Index. Native wildlife includes the crested anole and the Puerto Rico royal palm.
Source: Puerto Rico
