Santurce #1: One-Day Walking Tour

When I visit a city in a place that formerly "belonged" to the Spanish Empire, I try to see more than just the "old city." The "old city" will generally be most "attractive," touristic part of the city due to its colonial architecture and historical component, but it's also just one small part of an otherwise large city that has much more to see and many more stories to tell outside of the colonial era and that is more representative of the real place today.

I did some reading and found that Santurce, the most populated barrio or district of the San Juan municipality, may be the next place after Old San Juan for us to visit. I read on a blog that it was the "up and coming, hipster" neighborhood of San Juan.

The website HelloLittleHome.com has a great guide to exploring Santurce: https://hellolittlehome.com/sa...

The day for us was okay. It seemed like every museum or exhibit that I had identified along the walk to visit was closed. I already had known that some places had very limited hours. Other places had hours that didn't match what was on Google, which was honestly the case back home, too, in the year after Covid hit after so many business or public places had changed their hours in order to adjust to the societal changes that Covid forced on us.

In the end, though, visiting Santurce was way better than not visiting would have been! We got to see lots of street art, eat at two cool food truck parks, and explore some nice neighborhoods.

You can see where Santurce is located on the map below. The walking route that I drew in purple went through the heart of Santurce. Old San Juan (not seen in the picture) would be located off the top, left corner of the picture

We started on the right side of the purple route, right where the "half-rectangle" juts out of the straight N-S line over the yellow drop pin. We walked north to Calle Loíza, west to Miramar, through Miramar, down and back up Calle Cerra, and southeast down Avenida Juan Ponce de León until we turned a corner and ended up back at our apartment.

Pulguero is one of many "sub-barrios" of Santurce. This is where we found an apartment in Air BnB and stayed. 

The neighborhood was residential. It wasn't especially clean or fancy--not a tourist destination--But it was nice enough and safe, and because we were willing to stay here, we saved ourselves from paying the touristy prices of other parts of Santurce.

Below are two pictures of our apartment.

Calle Loíza is one of the most popular streets in Santurce for walking, shopping, eating, and drinking. It is in the Parque sub-barrio of Santurce.

We only went here during the day. We didn't go out at night because we had just found out that Ally was pregnant--Ha. We went to a restaurant called Tostado for breakfast.

The pictures below show Calle Loíza, a residential part off of Calle Loíza, and Ally sipping on watermelon juice at Tostado.

We walked to our next destination, the Miramar sub-barrio of Santurce, on Avenida Wilson, Route 26, and Avenida Juan Ponce de León. On Avenida Juan Ponce de León, we passed an office building of LUMA, the power company of Puerto Rico, pictured below.

During the time that we were in Puerto Rico (July 2021), there were anti-LUMA protests around the country, protesting the high cost of energy and asking the company to leave the island.

Miramar is one of the nicest sub-barrios of Santurce. It's located in the far northwest corner of the map you saw at the beginning of this post. We liked walking through this neighborhood and looking at the properties and houses.

We stopped at this food truck park for a midday snack.

To drink, we got these cool signature creation drinks from the Dr. Bizarro food truck. You can see a picture of their menu below. Ally got Life Potion and I got Potterbear, which was a drink inspired by Butterbeer, the famous drink of the wizarding community in the Harry Potter series. Here is Dr. Bizarro's Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/drbiz...

To eat, we got buñuelos de bacalao (fried dough fritter with cod inside) from Leña Eh. Here is their Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Len%C...

Santurce is full of street art. Calle Cerra features a lot of it.

Below you can see the "entrance" of the street, but I decided to include the pictures of street art from it in a different post devoted to pictures of all the street art throughout Santurce.

This is one of the main avenues of Santurce. It runs the entire length of the district. We walked along it to get back to our apartment from Miramar. 

It looked really cool with the trees on the sidewalk hanging over the street making a sort of "tree tunnel" at times. Also, in the hot, humid Caribbean climate of Puerto Rico in July, it was so nice to be able to walk in this shade.

Our final stop before returning to our apartment was Lote 23, another Santurce food truck park. Ally very much enjoyed her fried chicken sandwich.

Remember Pulguero? This is the sub-barrio of Santurce where we were staying. I took these few final pictures below.