Ponce… A Trip About Nothing

Ponce is known as “la ciu­dad de los leones”, the city of lions.

When I start­ed this site about six weeks ago I fool­ish­ly thought that I could help pro­mote Puer­to Rico as the amaz­ing vaca­tion des­ti­na­tion that it tru­ly is.  Boy was I wrong!  My idea was sim­ple: write about an ini­tial set of tourist attrac­tions —around 100 at first— and pur­pose­ful­ly leave a sec­ond group to be added on a week­ly basis.  That way I would always have new material.

Since most of the places that I left out were not busi­ness­es in them­selves, I would con­tact the per­son in charge, sched­ule a video inter­view and add the clip to our YouTube chan­nel and to our blog.  All this free of charge!

Well, guess what?  It has been like pulling teeth.  Every day you hear peo­ple com­plain­ing on the radio about how gov­ern­ment does­n’t sup­port tourism, and how what lit­tle help is avail­able goes to San Juan.  But when a reg­u­lar cit­i­zen like me tries to help, with no strings attached, those same peo­ple play hard to get and even obstruct his/her efforts..

Let me give you a short les­son in Puer­to Rican Span­ish.  In order to get any­thing done in Puer­to Rico you need some­thing called a “pala”.  In Span­ish the word “pala” means “shov­el”.  So, it’s sort of a graph­ic way of say­ing that in order to get any­thing done you need to “know” somebody.

Well, I’m not wired that way.  Maybe it was the for­ma­tive years that I spent in New York City, or maybe it was just my upbring­ing.  But when I need some­thing from an insti­tu­tion —gov­ern­men­tal or oth­er­wise— my first instinct is to do what any nor­mal cit­i­zen would do: call the switch­board; not a con­tact inside.

So that’s what I did in the case of Ponce.  I want­ed to vis­it Tibes Cer­e­mo­ni­al Park, the Old Fire Sta­tion and the Ponce Muse­um of His­to­ry, inter­view some­one knowl­edge­able about these places and shoot some video.  When I called the switch­board I was direct­ed to a pleas­ant young gen­tle­man (who’s name I pre­fer to leave out of this arti­cle) who said that he was in charge of all three places.  I told him what I need­ed and he agreed to the inter­views.  We sched­uled them for last Friday.

Ponce is Puer­to Rico’s sec­ond most impor­tant city.  It is locat­ed on the south­ern part of the Island, about a 70-mile dri­ve from Car­oli­na, where I have my office,

The Ponce Muse­um of His­to­ry is locat­ed on the cor­ner of Isabel and May­or Can­tera streets. See our map for coordinates.

I arrived around 10:30am.  I imme­di­ate­ly con­tact­ed this gen­tle­man and we agreed to con­duct the first inter­view in one of the muse­um halls.  While I was con­nect­ing my equip­ment there was this on look­ing lady who could­n’t hide her curios­i­ty.  I told her why I was there and went on about my business.

The inter­view went well.  Our host was knowl­edge­able, artic­u­late and had a pleas­ant per­son­al­i­ty.  The Ponce Muse­um of His­to­ry is a beau­ti­ful place with abun­dant infor­ma­tion about this seignio­r­i­al city.  I was also sur­prised to learn that Ponce has a total of 15 muse­ums and 25 his­toric sites.  That’s more muse­ums than San Juan itself.  Oh, and did I men­tion that admis­sion to this muse­um is free?

As luck would have it, right after we fin­ished the first inter­view, a sec­ond lady approached our inter­vie­wee and told him that he was not autho­rized to grant such an inter­view.  What’s more, she also told us that we could not go on with our plans for the day with­out an autho­riza­tion straight from the major.  Good luck with that!

Don’t get me wrong.  I under­stand that there are pro­ce­dures for these things, and that bureau­crats need to feel in charge.  But I nev­er intend­ed to cir­cum­vent that process.  I start­ed at the switch­board.  And if I was direct­ed by mis­take to the wrong per­son it was because of a train­ing prob­lem, not by any fault of mine, which in turn would bring us back to a man­age­ment issue.

In any case, there I was, with lots of use­less footage and noth­ing more to do for the day.  So I did what any rea­son­able per­son would have done.  I went to lunch with my wife!

I have to admit that I was angry.  There I was, 70 miles away from the office, invest­ing my own time and mon­ey to inter­view some­one for free.  And to top it all off they were giv­ing me a hard time?

That’s when it hit me.  I did­n’t need the aggra­va­tion.  I did­n’t need to chase peo­ple around just to do them a favor.  All I need­ed to do was act like a tourist.  All I need­ed to do was go about like a reg­u­lar tourist, vis­it the Island’s tourist attrac­tions and report what I saw; good or bad.  After all, isn’t that what reg­u­lar peo­ple do in sites like trip advi­sor, hotels.com and YouTube?  Why should I run around try­ing to help peo­ple who don’t want to help themselves?

So that’s what I decid­ed to do… right then and there.

After lunch we vis­it­ed the Old Fire Sta­tion, locat­ed on the east side of Luis Muñoz Rivera Square, in the cen­ter of town.  This is where we would have con­duct­ed our sec­ond inter­view.  But, since that did­n’t mate­ri­al­ize, what can I say?  Well, the place was built in 1883, it is well kept and it has lots of mem­o­ra­bil­ia includ­ing an old fire truck that seems to be in pris­tine con­di­tion (I won­der if it actu­al­ly works?).  While I was there, I did­n’t see any per­son­nel tak­ing care of vis­i­tors.  In fact, what I did see was a group of Amer­i­can tourists wan­der­ing around the fire­house like they were lost.

From there we took a stroll around Dege­tau Square.  The place is well kept and clean.  In fact, now that I men­tion it, one thing that real­ly struck us about Ponce in gen­er­al is how clean the city is.  I did­n’t see garbage on the streets, I hard­ly saw home­less peo­ple and I did­n’t see graf­fi­ti.  And let me tell you, this is some­thing that I always look for wher­ev­er I go.  If a city is dirty it speaks vol­umes about its peo­ple and its officials.

Now that I think about it, the only home­less per­son that I did see was sit­ting right next to the door in front of Ban­co Pop­u­lar.  I guess he real­ized that that was where peo­ple walked out with fresh cash (not a dumb move at all).

Ser­ral­lés Cas­tle (Castil­lo Serrallés)

Oh, and anoth­er thing!  I asked one of the city police­men about how to get to “Castil­lo Ser­ral­lés” (one of the city’s major tourist attrac­tions) and his instruc­tions were right on the dot.  Oh, and by the way, even though I speak per­fect Span­ish I also speak per­fect Eng­lish.  So I asked him in Eng­lish, just to see how well he did, and he passed with fly­ing col­ors.  His instruc­tions were pre­cise and in per­fect Eng­lish.  That’s a lot more than I can say for oth­er towns on the Island.

On the flip side none of the water foun­tains on Dege­tau Square were work­ing.  I don’t know if it’s a bud­getary thing, or if they are sim­ply out of order, but the place would have looked a lot more charm­ing if the foun­tains worked.

Then there were the lions.  There are around 10 or 20 lion stat­ues in dif­fer­ent cor­ners of the square.  Why?  Because lions are the city sym­bol.  But then, they’re not reg­u­lar lions.  No.  They’re paint­ed in all sorts of bright col­ors.   As far as I know that had to do with some sort of design competition.

Ponce Cathe­dral (Cat­e­dral de Ponce, Nues­tra Seño­ra de La Guadalupe)

On the west side of Luis Muñoz Rivera Square is Ponce Cathe­dral, ded­i­cat­ed to our Lady of Guadalupe.  It’s a beau­ti­ful build­ing paint­ed in light gray, white and dif­fer­ent shades of brown.  One thing that sur­prised me was the fact that it was closed.  Maybe I’m mis­tak­en, but I under­stood that Catholic church­es were open all through the day.

Now, some­thing that dis­tin­guish­es Ponce from any oth­er town in Puer­to Rico is that it actu­al­ly has two cen­ter squares that togeth­er form what we all know as Plaza Las Deli­cias.  The north­ern part (where the Old Fire Sta­tion and the Cathe­dral are) is known as Luis Muñoz Rivera Square.  And the south­ern side is known as Fed­eri­co Dege­tau Square.  In any case, it all forms a beau­ti­ful and huge square.

From there we took a short dri­ve up to “Cer­ro El Vigía” a moun­tain to the north of Plaza Dege­tau.  The dri­ve to “Cer­ro El Vigía” takes about 10 min­utes, but the bird’s eye view of the city is spec­tac­u­lar; espe­cial­ly if you climb to the top of the “El Vigía Cross”, a 100-foot struc­ture that’s at the very top of the mountain.

Across the street from “El Vigía Cross” (La Cruc­eta del Vigía) is the Ser­ral­lés Cas­tle (Castil­lo Ser­ral­lés), a four-sto­ry struc­ture built on the moun­tain­side in the 1930’s by the own­er of Pon­ce’s Des­til­ería Ser­ral­lés, one of the largest rum dis­til­leries in the world.

El Vigía Crosss (Cruze­ta del Vigía)

Both of these places are actu­al­ly muse­ums and they are open to the pub­lic.  But since we had vis­it­ed them both, and it was get­ting late, we decid­ed to vis­it them again in the future (as tourists) and cov­er the vis­it sep­a­rate­ly on Puer­to Rico By GPS.

Around 3:30pm we decid­ed to head back to Car­oli­na.  All in all I can’t say that the day was a total loss for var­i­ous rea­sons.  First, we were able to take the pret­ty pic­tures that you see on this post.  Sec­ond, we can attest to the fact that Ponce is a beau­ti­ful and well-kept town.  And final­ly, the expe­ri­ence drove home the fact that it’s a futile mis­sion to try to help peo­ple who don’t appre­ci­ate it (Puer­to Ricans in gen­er­al, not just the Ponceños).

So there you have them: my impres­sions about a wast­ed day try­ing to show my beloved Puer­to Rico to the world.  But don’t wor­ry.  I don’t give up that eas­i­ly.  I’ll be back out with my cam­eras in a cou­ple of days.  Only next time I’ll blend in with the crowd!

In the mean time, here’s a map with the GPS loca­tions to the places men­tioned in this article.

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©2013,Orlando Mer­gal, MA
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Bilin­gual Con­tent Cre­ator, Blog­ger, Pod­cast­er,
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