Jardin Botan­ico y Cul­tural de Caguas

This most beau­ti­ful, lush park cov­ers 60 acres.

Another, much larger botan­i­cal gar­den is located in San Juan on the grounds of the Uni­ver­sity of Puerto Rico. There is a 3rd botan­i­cal gar­den located near Mayaguez, also run by the Uni­ver­sity. Both of which I plan to visit some­time down the road.  There are also sev­eral smaller pri­vate gar­dens as well.

Get­ting to the Caguas Botan­i­cal Gar­dens is pretty straight­for­ward. From San Juan, you take Hwy 18 South to Hwy 52 South and get off at Exit 18. Take Hwy 196 to the right. Hwy 196 ends at the dri­ve­way to the Jardin Botan­ico y Cul­tural de Caguas where it inter­sects Hwy 156.

On Google Maps, Hwy 196 (per PR’s Dept. of Trans­porta­tion) is labeled PR 34/Ave. Zafiro.. I have no clue why.

You can eas­ily see where it runs into Hwy 156 and the unde­vel­oped area where the park resides. Google Maps needs to update the satel­lite view as it looks noth­ing like this now. All the maps I own show Hwy 156 off Hwy 52 so you could find it that way too. If you come in via Hwy 156 like we did, the Park is on your left. We missed the sign and drove on by. Some­one has planted a full hedge in front of the mar­quee almost com­pletely oblit­er­at­ing it. They need to make it more obvi­ous for folks com­ing in from San Juan who have never been here.

The Caguas Gar­dens is open from 10AM to 4PM, but you can hang out until 6PM before they kick you out, Thurs­day through Sun­day. It cost me $7 to get in, $4 for seniors (60+) and kids (7 – 12).

As it turns out,
I think $7 was a fair price.

More than I would have hoped for, but there is a lot to see here. Guided tours are avail­able at an addi­tional cost and if you want it in Eng­lish, you need to call ahead. One review I read said they never were able to make con­tact to set up the Eng­lish tour. They also list a trans­porta­tion fee to cover the ‘trams’, over-size golf carts, but I did not look into that. You are not allowed to bring food or drink in, but there are con­ces­sion stands and restrooms located all over the park.

I was there on a Thurs­day.. the place was just short of deserted.

Upon entry, they tag you with a paper bracelet and hand out a very well done full color brochure with map. Its in Span­ish and Eng­lish. I did see a cou­ple of minor errors in it.. one of the paths we took was not shown, the main roads out­side the park were not labeled and the Web address did not work. more about that later. Still, very nicely done!

The orig­i­nal site was a com­mer­cial sugar mill. Hacienda San José served as an impor­tant sugar pro­cess­ing plant up until 1920. The rail­road used to off-load cane here for pro­cess­ing. Ruins of the old facil­ity are scat­tered over dif­fer­ent parts of the Park.

The Park itself is divided into sev­eral areas.

These include a small museum with glass dis­play cases and a mul­ti­me­dia pre­sen­ta­tion in Span­ish run­ning over­head, a library book store, a gift shop, a ded­i­cated area for ‘Arte­sanos’ to sell their crafts (though there were none to be seen), Rum dis­tillery ruins, a huge man-made pond (as clean as any swim­ming pool) with paddle-boat rental, ded­i­cated bird obser­va­tion areas, an Ances­tral African Grove, an Ances­tral Taino Indian Grove, a col­lec­tion of Taino Indian Pet­ro­glyphs, an enclosed bird sanc­tu­ary, a lily-pad pond with small fish in it, a ded­i­cated green house area and a work­ing model of an old Puerto Rican peas­ant farm with gar­den. Whew!

But Wait! There’s More!

Then there are the many, many exam­ples of plants, flow­ers, and trees.

Most have lit­tle signs iden­ti­fy­ing them. Vari­eties from all over the world, are located here. Its worth not­ing that though the Botan­i­cal Gar­den is open year round, some of what’s in sea­son changes every cou­ple of months. Flow­ers and fruit bear­ing trees in particular.

For a botan­i­cal gar­den that did not exist six years ago, they have come a long way.

A stream mean­ders through much of the Park. A nat­ural attrac­tion for birds and other crit­ters. I have seen some big lizards and igua­nas since I got to PR, but this place has them in spades. The igua­nas try to avoid you and make a chat­ter kind of warn­ing if you get too close. Then they run off!

Though I had tele­photo lenses with me on this 1st pass through the Park, I never pulled them out. I used only my ‘nor­mal’ and ‘wide angle’ zoom lenses to shoot every­thing here. The photo oppor­tu­ni­ties are absolutely out­stand­ing! I will be back to make a day of it shoot­ing birds from one of their ded­i­cated view­ing stands. They look down into a swampy low­land area with the stream run­ning through it.

From the front gate..

We turned right, through a long arbor, over to the museum, then onto the old sugar mill chim­ney, then on around to the paddle-boat area. We walked back next to the ‘pond’ where the old water well is located. This is the path that’s not on the map. We pro­ceeded back up to the green­houses, but 4 of the 6 were empty and the other 2 were pad­locked. One had small trees in pots and the other looked like it was set up for hydro­pon­ics. The green­house area was obvi­ously not ‘ready for prime-time’. Live and learn. After that, We headed to the old dis­tillery ruins. Lots of photo opps there. Then it was off to the enclosed bird sanc­tu­ary where the cages made it hard to shoot the birds, then up to the lily-pond.

We back­tracked to the back side of the big ‘pond’ (small lake?), to cross the 1st of two bridges. From there, I spot­ted a Crane in the stream, chas­ing after lunch. This path took us deeper into the park and onto the rus­tic ‘Jibaro’ house, a Puerto Rican coun­try home with veg­etable and herb gar­den. Lots to see and shoot here… Banana plants, cof­fee plants, pep­per plants, flow­er­ing trees.. plants I had never seen before… chick­ens and roost­ers run­ning around.  This is the only path in the park that is a lit­tle hard to walk.  No big­gie.  The rest of the paths are fine gravel.

We stopped next door at a funky lit­tle out­door kiosk (for lack of a bet­ter descrip­tion). They had cold bot­tled water, soda pop and fresh fried food. We split a ‘Bacalaito’… a fried frit­ter made from flour and bits of ‘Bacalao’, salted dried (rehy­drated) Cod fish mixed in. It’s actu­ally quite good fresh and this was. It cost a whop­ping buck.. water was a buck too. This is a pop­u­lar road-side dish in PR and can be had almost anywhere.

After our lit­tle break, we headed back across the other bridge. Its a heavy-duty, long steel sus­pen­sion foot bridge and sways a lit­tle in the wind. The views up and down the creek were mag­nif­i­cent as were the tall stands of Bam­boo.  This path con­tin­ues on to the ded­i­cated bird view­ing area and where I saw another large iguana, chat­ter­ing away in the trees. We have lizards at home in Coamo, but they are all very small in com­par­i­son…
I fig­ure its ’cause the cats keep bring­ing them home as ‘gifts’ for us.

I digress.

From here,
we headed back to the gate and home.

Elapsed time– 3 hours, 45 minutes!

A slightly over­cast, but breezy day. All in all, I had a great time and have no prob­lem giv­ing the Caguas Botan­i­cal Gar­dens, a full five skull rat­ing! As I already said, I will even­tu­ally make it back for more pho­tog­ra­phy. Guanica could learn some­thing by check­ing out what Caguas did here. There were cov­ered benches every­where. Much thought (and money) went into the design of this won­der­ful park.

A Few Words About their Web Presence…

There is a Web site for the Caguas Botan­i­cal Gar­dens, but I could not get to it via the address posted on the sign out front or printed on the col­or­ful brochure. [caguas.com.pr] tossed up a “Could not find the server” mes­sage. What’s more, [caguas.com] was an ‘MFA’ site (Made For Ads) designed to make money on your ‘click-throughs’. I never do that… use links found on MFA sites. A Dog­pile search gave me this link to their site cour­tesy of the Munici­pio Autonomo de Caguas.

It’s entirely in Span­ish as are most gov­ern­ment Web sites in Puerto Rico.

From a mar­ket­ing stand point, this is the Caguas Botan­i­cal Garden’s Achilles Heel. It needs a rich Web site extolling its many attrib­utes. And it needs to be in Eng­lish as well as Span­ish. OH! and for­get the Flash graph­ics, they don’t play well on most smart phones like the iPhone or Black­berry. K.I.S.S. You got kids? Ask them about surf­ing the Web from a phone. Its the future, ya know.

Just my 2 cents.

This place should be busy, every day! An easy day trip out of San Juan.

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