Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico is the Caribbean without the paperwork, and it fits an improbable amount into an island you can drive across in an afternoon. Old San Juan is the opening act: a UNESCO-listed grid of blue cobblestones and pastel façades, two Spanish fortresses holding the headland, and a bar that still claims to have invented the piña colada. Twenty minutes east, the beach hotels of Condado and Isla Verde put the sand directly beneath the room, which is the practical reason most visitors sleep there and go into the old city for the evening rather than the other way round. Then the island opens up. El Yunque is the only tropical rainforest in the United States forest system, loud with coquí frogs and waterfalls barely an hour from the capital. Off the east coast, Vieques holds Mosquito Bay, the brightest bioluminescent bay measured anywhere on earth, where a single paddle stroke lights the water blue. The currency is the dollar, the sockets are American, and nothing needs converting. Few places make the tropics this easy to reach and this hard to sum up.

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