Ponce

People lived in the area long before Europeans: the ceremonial centre at Tibes, on the city's northern edge, was built by the Igneri, who settled there around 25 AD, and later used by the Taíno. A Spanish settlement grew around a chapel to Our Lady of Guadalupe raised in 1670, and on 12 August 1692 it was founded, named after Juan Ponce de León y Loayza, great-grandson of the conquistador. It was chartered as a village in 1712.

The 19th century made Ponce. Immigrants arrived in large numbers, sugar and coffee estates spread across the plain and the hills, and the town was declared a villa in 1848 and a city in 1877. The city's electric grid was switched on for the Ponce Fair of 1882, whose exhibition pavilion became Puerto Rico's first fire station. When the United States invaded in 1898, Ponce was the largest city on the island, with 22,000 people.

The 20th century brought hard times. Hurricane San Ciriaco devastated the region in 1899, and on Palm Sunday, 21 March 1937, police opened fire on unarmed members of a peaceful Nationalist Party march and on bystanders, in what became known as the Ponce massacre, the largest in Puerto Rican history. Sugar cultivation ended in 1976 and unemployment soared. Ponce became Puerto Rico's first autonomous municipality in 1992. Hurricane Maria struck in 2017, and the magnitude 6.4 earthquake of 7 January 2020 damaged the city; that year the historic zone was named one of America's most endangered historic places.

Ponce has been called the birthplace of Puerto Rican national identity. Its historic zone is a showcase of Neoclásico Isabelino and the Ponce Creole style that developed here between the 19th and early 20th centuries, and the city has an unusually rich set of museums, from the Museo de Arte de Ponce, founded by the industrialist Luis A. Ferré, to museums of music, local history and the 1937 massacre.

Music runs deep. The danza, the favourite music of 19th-century high society, had its master in Juan Morel Campos of Ponce, who played the cathedral organ, and the African-rooted bomba and plena rose mainly in Ponce. The Teatro La Perla, opened in 1864, has long been the stage of the city's cultural life.

The year's high point is the Carnaval de Ponce, dating back to 1858 and the oldest in Puerto Rico, a week of parades and celebrations ending on Shrove Tuesday. The city's nicknames — La Perla del Sur, La Ciudad Señorial and La Ciudad de las Quenepas, after the genip fruit — are used with pride.

The municipality of Ponce had 137,491 people at the 2020 census, making it the most populous municipality outside the San Juan metropolitan area, and the wider Ponce metropolitan area had 278,477. It is the second-largest municipality in Puerto Rico by land area, with 31 barrios, 12 of them in the city's urban area and 19 outside it.

The economy once depended almost entirely on sugar cane. Since the 1950s it has diversified into manufacturing, retail and tourism, alongside agriculture and services, and the city is a regional seat for both Puerto Rican and US federal government offices. Industries founded here in the early 20th century included Ponce Cement, Puerto Rico Iron Works and the Serrallés distillery.

Plaza Las Delicias, flanked by the cathedral and the city hall, is the centre of civic life. The 2020 earthquakes closed the La Guancha waterfront, and like the rest of the island the city lives with an unreliable power grid. The population has fallen, from 166,327 at the 2010 census.

Ponce eats the cocina criolla of Puerto Rico: rice with pigeon peas, roast pork, stewed beans, mofongo of mashed fried plantain with garlic and pork crackling, and fried tostones. Arroz con gandules served with pernil, slow-roast pork shoulder, is the classic holiday plate, and pasteles wrapped in banana leaf appear at Christmas. The historic market hall downtown, the Plaza del Mercado, opened in 1863.

The city's sweet tooth is famous. King's Cream, opposite the Parque de Bombas, has made handmade ice cream for two generations. Quenepas, the small green genip fruit, are so associated with the city that it is nicknamed La Ciudad de las Quenepas.

The surrounding region shaped the drinks. The Serrallés family, makers of Don Q rum, built their distillery fortune here, and the sugar and rum story is told at their hilltop castle. Coffee grew in the hills to the north, as the restored plantation at Hacienda Buena Vista shows, and Puerto Rican highland coffee is the everyday drink.