Day two of my birthday week - a BirthDAY adventure

Yesterday was a Birthday/Tuesday Adventure Day to a couple of places we've wanted to visit and finally did.

First stop was La Cueva Ventana (the Window Cave) up in the center of the island. It's a very popular attraction that has become more "civilized" in recent years. It's on private property and the owners started charging admission a couple of years ago. Now there are (informed, educated) guides. Visitors wear hard hats and are given flashlights. Those changes are actually are good things. They've reduced the trash and the vandalism to this beautiful, historically important site.

Along the trail from the parking lot to the cave entrance, the guide talks about the geology, biology and history of the area. For example, this tree is known at the "Guardian" because it "protects" an entrance to one of the caverns.

At the cave entrance the group climbs a steep path down into the darkness. From the entrance to the Window (la ventana) is a 300' walk (it truly doesn't seem that long). Tat the end is a large cavern room with the window at the end.  From the lip of the window the the valley floor below is a nearly 800 foot drop. There are so many pictures of the valley through the window on Facebook it has become one of the iconic images of Puerto Rico.

The center of the island is like Swiss cheese, riddled with holes and caves. There are more that 2,000 known caves, only about 200 of which have been fully explored and mapped. (A friend of ours spends several weeks each year mapping caves on Mona Island, a tiny island in the Mona Passage between Puerto Rico and the Domincan Republic. He told me there are 225 caves on Mona. They've mapped and explored 210 of them. He said they have at least three more years of work on the island. And those are just caves above water. There are more below.) Many of these caves are important historic and archeological sites. Some, including La Cueva Ventana, have pictographs and art left by indigenous peoples.

Unfortunately, many of the caves also include "art" left more recently.

Part 2 of the Adventure coming later.