Here we are in San Juan Puerto Rico

Here is the view from the ship as we pulled into the harbor of San Juan. You can see the Spanish fort walls along the beach. We spent most of the day at the fort.


Here we are nicely docked. The boys were more than eager to explore the town.

There were many nice walkways along the water with large trees. We of course are making a bee-line to the fort.

The walls were over 50 feet high in most places. The Spanish got here first thanks to Columbus so they built forts everywhere to protect the silver and gold they were "exporting". Apparently they grabbed 250,000 tons of gold in the first couple of years setting up shop in this part of the world. Which was something like one 3rd of the worlds supply at that time. So they could afford to build these massive forts.

Here is one of the sentinel look out posts. They basically just hang on to the top corner of the wall. I thought it was pretty neat to make something like that completely out of stone.

We walked for about a mile and a half along the bottom of the wall it was quite hot and we thought at the end of the path along the bottom of the wall there would be a way to get to the fort at the top...... Unfortunately there wasn't and we had to walk all the way back to go through the main gate to get to the fortifications along the top of the wall.

Here is a pic of the main gate. This was the official entrance into the fort/city. it was quite ingeniously layed out and not many people were able to sneak by in there sailing ships without getting blown to bits by the cannon fire.

Here we are going down to the battlements at the top of the wall. As you can see it commanded a complete view of the horizon.

Here is a picture of the boys at one of the sentential outposts. Apparently the average height of the Spanish soldier back then was like 5 ft. So it was a bit small even for the kids to check out.

Here are the boys at the main lookout area. You can basically see in every direction for miles and miles. You can also see the little island across the bay the Spanish had a much smaller fort set up there. And between the two forts they could effectively cut off any entrance to the bay with there cannon cross fire.

Here is a picture of the lower fortifications. apparently they used to heat cannon balls till they were red hot and shoot them across the water at any ships (the heated cannon balls would bounce on the surface of the water increasing the chance of hitting the enemies ship hauls.)

Checking out the cannons

While we were there at the fort this cruise ship went by. So i took a pic, thankfully it was not our ship.

The boys in a store house of the fort.

Here is a view of the path at the base of the wall that we took in the morning.

Here is a cruise ship that was moored next to us. it had 5 masts and motorized sails. It looked real interesting.

Here is another picture of the same ship you can see the masts better in this picture.

We set out at about 10;00 that evening to our next port of call. St Thomas. More pictures coming about that. Stay tuned.