Like Caguana, this has none of the grandiose ruins of Central America, but the guides do their best to bring the site alive with illuminating facts and anecdotes, and if you visit early, you’ll almost certainly have it to yourself. The site was inhabited for 1500 years by a series of migrating peoples and primarily used as a burial ground and ceremonial centre, littered with ball-courts and standing stones. Centro Ceremonial Indígena de TibesĮvidence of pre-Columbian civilization has been rare in the Caribbean until relatively recently, but the CENTRO CEREMONIAL INDÍGENA DE TIBES (787/840-2255) remains one of the region’s greatest discoveries, proof of highly complex societies long before the Spanish conquest. The Centro Ceremonial Indígena de Tibes is one of the most significant Pre-Taíno archeological sites ever found, and a tantalizing window into the culture of this now lost civilization, while Hacienda Buena Vista is a captivating nineteenth-century plantation. Just north of Ponce are two of the most memorable sights on the island, both associated with the region’s long and eventful history. To the east, the hot springs at Coamo Dropdown content are a pleasant novelty, but the town itself is a fine product of sugar country, with nearby Guayama Dropdown content another gracefully weathered example. To the west, the humdrum town of Yauco Dropdown content boasts a number of less-visited treasures to complement its prestigious coffee, while Guánica Dropdown content is best known for its remarkable dry forest and series of enticing beaches, the only section of the south coast mobbed by tourists. Outside Ponce, make time for the Centro Ceremonial Indígena de Tibes Dropdown content, one of the most important archeological sites in the Caribbean, and Hacienda Buena Vista Dropdown content, a lush coffee plantation frozen in the nineteenth century. Ponce Dropdown content is the capital of the south, Puerto Rico’s second city and peppered with ebullient architecture and museums, a poignant legacy of those heady days of sugar. By World War II the sugar industry had collapsed, and today great swathes of the south are empty, overgrown prairies, a haunting reminder of a lost era. Sugar changed everything, with plantations rapidly colonizing the narrow strip between the Central Cordillera and the coast in the nineteenth century. Some of the most powerful Taíno kingdoms were based here, home to Agüeybaná himself, overlord of the island when the Spanish arrived in 1508, but the conquerors focused their efforts elsewhere and the south remained thinly populated until the eighteenth century.
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