Resorts and parks, Puerto Rico has it all

Aside from the rapper Bad Bunny, if there’s one thing that Puerto Ricans are proud of it’s their national park.

And they have good reason. El Yunque National Forest is the only park in the U.S. National Forest System that is a bona-fide tropical rain forest.

Furthermore, consider these facts, taken from the National Forest Foundation: “The El Yunque contains over 240 species of native trees, of which 88 are rare and 23 are only found in the Forest. Along with the trees, the El Yunque hosts 50 species of native orchids, over 150 species of ferns, and 127 species of terrestrial vertebrates.”

Not that I can speak for all Puerto Ricans. But at least three people, either in hotels or restaurants, not to mention an inordinately friendly Delta flight attendant, smiled when they learned that we planned to visit the park

“You’ll like it,” was the typical reaction.

Getting there was the challenge. As I’ve posted before, on our recent circumnavigation of the island we stayed for a couple of nights just outside the city of Ponce. And that put us squarely in the center of Puerto Rico’s southern coast.

Since El Yunque is situated on the island’s northeast corner, we opted to see if we could enter the park from its southwestern edge. Which proved to be troublesome.

The problem was that once we got off the main highway, the traffic through the back country was congested. And even when that cleared up, the narrow, sometimes one-lane roadway made for some close calls with approaching cars, drivers who would pull out in front of us without warning and looming potholes.

And then as we gained altitude, we ultimately realized that though the views of this mountainous part of the park were amazing, we’d be better off going around to the other side and come in through the main entrance.

First, though, we took a short detour into the world of privilege. And its name is El Conquistador.

I want to stress that neither my wife, Mary Pat, nor I come from privileged backgrounds. Her father was a longtime working man for the Caterpillar Corp., while mine was a career U.S. naval officer. Neither of us grew up belonging to a country club, nor do we belong to anything of the sort to this day. And we just can’t bring ourselves to pay the inflated prices for business-class tickets even on long-distance flights (say from L.A. to Sydney).

Yet for our final two nights in Puerto Rico, we decided to splurge. So MP booked us a room at the place I mentioned above: the El Conquistador Resort, which likes to bill itself as a “Puerto Rico Paradise” and “The Oceanfront resort where you can have it all.”

The resort, which is located just a 15-minute drive from the city of Fajardo, is a mini-city unto itself. It opened during the summer of 1962 and originally boasted 84 rooms on four floors. Six years later it grew in size to 388 rooms and, following a few fallow years, it expanded even more, having added a new golf course and any number of other modern facilities.

As with a lot of the island, 2017’s Hurricane María devastated the resort. But by May of 2021, the place reopened and now offers 677 rooms – a number that is scheduled to grow to 750 by 2026.

And the good news for us was that the nightly price for a room was no more than we pay to stay in an average hotel in Seattle. (We did play nine holes on the resort’s immaculate course, but I knocked my first two drives into a thicket so dense it could hide the entirety of The Spokesman-Review’s classic tower – and my round proceeded to get progressively worse from there.)

Whatever, one of the features of the resort is that it sits just 35 minutes from the park that everyone insisted we visit: El Yunque National Forest.

Which was handy because we held off heading there until the morning of the day we were scheduled to leave. We left the resort just after 9 and less than an hour later we were passing through the gate ($8 per person), parking and walking through the El Portal visitor’s center.

What can you expect to see? Here’s what the website tells you: “At El Portal you can enjoy a trail, an educational exhibit pavilion, interpretive panels, the Puerto Rican parrot exhibit with three live parrots, the screening of the film ‘El Yunque National Forest: Beyond the Peaks and Seas,’ art installations, and a restaurant with great food.”

Pressed for time we took only a short walk around the immediate area, which is a small part of the 186,000-acre reserve, but it gave us a feel for what the larger forest has to offer. And as it turns out, we wouldn’t have been able to see much anyway due to the ongoing work to repair damage done by the last couple of hurricanes to hit the island.

As the website states, “The damage caused by hurricanes Irma and Maria (both 2017) around the entire forest was significant, and we continue to recover.”

Despite what little we saw, it turns out the people I talked to, including that Delta flight attendant, were right. What we saw we liked, so much so we’re thinking of forming our own brand of country club.

It’s one that even Bad Bunny might want to join.

Call it Puerto Rico Proud.