Puerto Rico is small.
Roughly 100 miles long and about 35 miles wide, it occupies only a tiny piece of the Caribbean. On a world map, it can almost disappear beside the enormous landmasses of North and South America.
But size has never been a particularly good way to measure Puerto Rico.
For centuries, this island has sat at the intersection of cultures, trade routes, political systems, and even tectonic plates. Along the way, Puerto Rico and its people have contributed to science, commerce, industry, culture, food, drink, and history on a scale that seems almost disproportionate to the island's physical size.
And some of the examples are genuinely extraordinary.
How Big Can a Small Island Be?
Puerto Rico is home to one of the most remarkable scientific installations ever constructed. Just offshore lies an extreme of the natural world. Its mountains contain attractions unlike almost anything else in the Americas. Its waters contain natural phenomena found in very few places on Earth.
There are enormous monuments, enormous businesses, and surprisingly important contributions to science.
There is even a Puerto Rican drink that recently found itself sitting at the very top of an international ranking.
And then there are the people.
One Puerto Rican lived long enough to experience an almost unimaginable span of modern history—from the early 20th century through two world wars, enormous political changes in Puerto Rico, the Spanish influenza pandemic, the Space Age, the Internet, and COVID-19.
Taken individually, these are interesting stories.
Put them together, and they say something much larger about Puerto Rico.
Puerto Rico: Small Island, Big Impact
That is the idea behind this episode of Chronicles & Cocktails.
Rather than simply celebrating Puerto Rico for the sake of celebrating it, I wanted to look at ten extraordinary things connected to the island and understand what makes each of them important.
Some come from nature.
Others were built by human beings.
Some represent scientific achievement. Others represent commerce, culture, ingenuity, longevity, or simply the strange circumstances of geography.
And halfway through, naturally, we're stopping for a cocktail.
This time, we're making Coquito—one of Puerto Rico's great Christmas traditions and a drink whose reputation has now traveled far beyond the island.
So how can a place this small contain so many things that are among the biggest, deepest, brightest, longest, or most extraordinary of their kind?
That's exactly what we're going to find out.
Watch the full episode of Chronicles & Cocktails: Top 10 Amazing Things from a Very Small Island — Puerto Rico.
Come for the Top 10.
Stay for the history.
And, as always…
Salud!
