Puerto Rico historical timeline

Puerto Rico's history is that of a strategic island held by two empires in succession and never, so far, by itself. What a visitor sees -- the walls and forts of San Juan, the sugar country, the federal signage, the blue tarpaulins still on some roofs -- is the trace of each holder and of the storm that tested all of it.

Chronology

1. 1493 The Spanish reach the island on the second voyage from Europe; the dominant people are the Taíno, whose name for the island, Borikén, survives in the word boricua. Spain claims it.
2. 1508 The first European settlement, Caparra, is founded on 8 August by Juan Ponce de León, who is greeted by the Taíno cacique Agüeybaná and becomes the island's first governor. He had been chosen by the Spanish Crown that year to lead the conquest and enslavement of the Taíno for gold mining, and within a few decades much of the Taíno population was gone to disease and violence. The Taíno words a visitor keeps meeting -- hamaca, huracán, Borikén -- outlasted the people who spoke them.
3. 1521 San Juan is established on its islet; in 1539 Charles I commissions the fort at the harbour mouth, El Morro, which grows into a hornwork bastion fort by 1595. The city's blue cobblestones and flat-roofed houses date from the 16th and 17th centuries.
4. 1868 The Grito de Lares, the first revolt against Spanish rule, is staged on 23 September by the Revolutionary Committee of Puerto Rico, founded in exile in the Dominican Republic that January by Ramón Emeterio Betances and Segundo Ruiz Belvis. It failed, but its flag is recognised as the first flag of Puerto Rico, and 23 September is still marked -- which is why a visitor in Lares finds a date rather than a monument.
5. 1873 Slavery, on which the sugar economy ran, is formally abolished. The last half of the century is marked by the struggle for sovereignty from Spain.
6. 1876 King Alfonso XII formally sets aside the forest region on the Luquillo mountains to protect its soil and water and regulate timber cutting, making it one of the oldest reserves in the Western Hemisphere -- only four years younger than Yellowstone. Theodore Roosevelt set aside the same Crown lands as the Luquillo Forest Reserve on 17 January 1903, and it is now El Yunque, the only tropical rainforest in the United States National Forest System.
7. 1898 The United States invades during the Spanish–American War and the island becomes a US possession, ending four hundred years of Spanish rule.
8. 1917 The Jones–Shafroth Act makes Puerto Ricans US citizens. In 1952 Congress approves a constitution under which residents elect their governor; the territory is named Estado Libre Asociado in Spanish and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico in English.
9. 1937 The Ponce massacre: on Palm Sunday, 21 March, police fire on a permitted Nationalist Party march in Ponce, killing 17 civilians, one policeman and one National Guardsman and wounding more than 200. The march had been called to commemorate the abolition of slavery in 1873. No one in the chain of command, including the US-appointed governor who ordered the permit cancelled, was prosecuted. The site in Ponce is marked, and the event is why the independence movement is discussed on the island in a register North American visitors rarely expect.
10. 1947 The Puerto Rican legislature passes the Industrial Incentives Act in May, granting new industry a ten-year exemption from most taxes. Of the 516,730 jobs on the island in 1940, almost half were in agriculture and 124,076 of those on sugarcane farms; Operation Bootstrap moved that workforce into factories within a generation. It is the reason the coastal plain looks industrial rather than agricultural, and the reason the sugar centrales are ruins.
11. 1983 El Morro and the San Juan National Historic Site are declared a World Heritage Site. The Puerto Rican parrot, confined to the Luquillo mountains since 1960, is listed as critically endangered in 1994.
12. 2003 In May the US Navy withdraws from Vieques after decades of bombing practice, and much of the island becomes a National Wildlife Refuge.
13. 2017 Hurricane Irma passes north on 5 September and leaves a million people without power; Hurricane Maria hits the island directly on 20 September and destroys its electricity, water, transport and communications. Millions are without power for months and the death toll is later put at an estimated 2,975.

What survived, and how

San Juan's walls survived because they were built to: the forts held off the sea and then held off nothing, and the National Park Service keeps them. The forest survived by growing back, as rainforests do, though the trails and the visitor centre took longer than the trees. The Taíno survived in the language -- hurricane is one of their words -- and in the name Puerto Ricans give themselves.

What did not survive Maria is the reason the island works as it does now: the grid, the water system and the roads were rebuilt, and the limits a visitor meets at El Yunque are the recovery's, not the forest's.