Holidays in Puerto Rico

Official national public holidays. Regional and religious observances may vary by area.

About Time in Puerto Rico

A Sovereignty Established in Six Separate Steps

Puerto Rico did not become American territory on a single date but through a slow, legally layered sequence spread across nearly two years. United States forces invaded the island on 25 July 1898, during the Spanish-American War. Spain formally renounced sovereignty under an armistice signed just eighteen days later, on 12 August, yet actual Spanish authority did not end on the ground until 18 October 1898, when the last Spanish officials evacuated and American sovereignty effectively began.

The paperwork took even longer to catch up with the reality on the island. The Treaty of Paris, under which Spain formally ceded Puerto Rico to the United States, was not signed until 10 December 1898, and did not legally take effect until the two governments exchanged ratifications and President William McKinley proclaimed it in force on 11 April 1899, five months after the signing and nearly two years after the invasion itself. Puerto Rico then spent a further thirteen months under direct U.S. military government before Congress replaced it with a civilian administration under the Foraker Act on 1 May 1900, and it would be more than half a century later, on 25 July 1952, exactly fifty-four years to the day after the original 1898 invasion, that Puerto Rico's status changed again with the proclamation of the Commonwealth.

Thirteen Years Before It Had Its Permanent Name

The oldest European-founded city under the United States flag did not begin where it stands today. In 1508, Juan Ponce de León, recently appointed the island's first governor, established the original settlement at a site called Caparra, named after a Roman-era town in Spain, on marshy ground a short distance inland. Within a year, colonists were petitioning to move, complaining of the mosquito-infested location and its isolation from the harbour, and in 1509 the settlement relocated to a small coastal islet, the site of what is now Old San Juan.

The names took even longer to settle into their modern arrangement than the town itself did. Columbus had named the island San Juan Bautista in 1493, while the new coastal settlement initially took the name Puerto Rico, "rich port." It was not until 1521 that the town received its formal combined name, San Juan Bautista de Puerto Rico, and sometime in the following decade the two names quietly swapped their objects: the island became known simply as Puerto Rico, and its capital took the name San Juan, an arrangement so thoroughly settled today that few visitors realise the city and the island it anchors once wore each other's names.

Six Hours That Started the Longest Blackout in American History

Hurricane Maria made landfall on Puerto Rico at 6:15 in the morning on 20 September 2017, a Category 4 storm carrying sustained winds averaging 123 miles per hour for roughly twelve continuous hours as it crossed the island. By the following day, essentially all 3.4 million residents, along with tens of thousands more in the neighbouring U.S. Virgin Islands, were without power, a blackout of a scale and duration that researchers combing through the historical record could find no precedent for anywhere in the United States.

The recovery timeline stretched out in stages that themselves became a kind of public countdown. It took until 28 November, more than two months after landfall, for federal officials to report that even half of the island's normal peak electricity load had been restored. Roughly six months after the storm, on 21 March 2018, the government announced that more than ninety percent of power had returned. But the very last connected households, concentrated in remote mountain communities where access roads themselves needed months of repair before crews could even reach the lines, did not get power back until mid-August 2018, 328 days after the hurricane first struck, making it, by a wide margin, the longest electrical blackout in United States history.

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