Founded in 1573 and the second town the Spanish established on the island, San Germán sits in the hills of the south-west with a historic centre of some hundred and fifty listed buildings and none of the cruise traffic that shapes Old San Juan.
The reason to come is Porta Coeli. Built in 1606 as part of a Dominican convent, it is one of the oldest church buildings in the Americas and the only surviving example of the plain medieval Gothic form the Spanish brought to the New World before Baroque taste caught up with them — a squat masonry box at the top of a brick stair, with a beamed ceiling of ausubo wood and a small museum of religious art inside.
The two plazas below it are the other pleasure: Santo Domingo and Francisco Mariano Quiñones, laid out at different periods and lined with colonial, neoclassical and criollo houses in various states of repair. The town is a university town too, which keeps it alive rather than preserved.