Some of the highest concentrations of petroglyphs on the island reside on the Taína Route, starting from the sea cave Cueva del Indio near northern Arecibo, a 45-minute drive from San Juan, to a ceremonial site on the southern coast near Ponce. Whether you rent a car and go at your own pace or join a tour, here’s where you can connect with the customs that helped shape this complex island-and where to keep an eye out for chupacabras along the way. As Taíno groups call for more inclusion in how their narrative is told, there are emerging opportunities for travelers to immerse themselves in Taíno culture. Since 2016, a collaboration between archaeologists, the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture, and local conservationists has been trying to promote this legacy through the heritage trail. “Whatever becomes of Taíno resurgence moving forward, its survived and rekindled spiritual expressions point to a desired and needed world where the future is ancestral, the future is ancient, the future is Atabey,” one of two supreme ancestral spirits in the Taíno religion. ( Meet the survivors of a ‘paper genocide’.)Ĭhristina Gonzalez, a researcher with the Smithsonian Institution’s Caribbean Indigenous Legacies Project, writes that understanding the Taíno way of respecting the living world is not just about the past or specific sacred spaces, but also the survival of the planet. Even the moniker used to self-identify as Puerto Rican, Boricua, comes from the Taíno word Borinquen. The Taíno peoples’ legacy is woven into the fabric of Puerto Rico’s identity, from pasteles, meat and vegetable-filled yuca, to traditional hammock-weaving using maguey plants. While once believed to have been wiped out after the Spanish conquest, the Taíno continue to endure across the Caribbean’s Antilles islands, Colombia, and Venezuela. The Taíno people descended from migrating Arawak-speaking communities in South America.
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