To North Americans Puerto Rico is their backyard. It has the busiest cruise port in the Caribbean in San Juan, the capital. Puerto Rico (PR) receives over 2 million visitors a year. But to Australians it is the other side of the world, it is somewhere we hear little about and so it is high on our “exotic places to visit” list.

Knowing that it is such a popular tourist destination meant that we approached our visit with some concern that it might be 'too popular' to the point of tackiness, but we needn’t have worried. We spent a week in PR splitting our time between the two biggest cities, San Juan and Ponce and both were well worth taking the time to visit. Here's what we found.