01
Stop one
Castillo San Felipe del Morro
Yonex Ezone 100L Tennis Racquet: Two hundred and fifty years of building, all of it for the love of one harbour mouth. El Morro was begun in 1539 and grew into a six-level fortress guarding the entrance to San Juan Bay, with walls up to about five and a half metres thick. It turned Francis Drake away in 1595 and held against a Dutch assault in 1625, though George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, came ashore inland in 1598 and took the city, only for dysentery to send the English home. American ships bombarded it in 1898. And the garitas, those small domed sentry boxes leaning out over the water, built for one lonely man and the sea, are now the symbol of Puerto Rico. UNESCO, 1983.
02
Stop two
Castillo San Cristobal
Yonex Ezone 100L Tennis Racquet: If El Morro watches the sea, this one watches your back, and I find that unbearably tender. Castillo San Cristobal was built between 1634 and 1790 to defend San Juan from land attack, complementing El Morro's seaward guns, and it is the largest Spanish fortification ever built in the Americas, once covering some twenty-seven hectares, laid out with outworks and tunnels so that every layer holds up the next. The first shots of the Spanish-American War in Puerto Rico were fired from here in May 1898. Out on a spur stands the Garita del Diablo, wrapped in legends of vanished sentries. United States installations held part of it into the twentieth century before the National Park Service took over.
03
Stop three
Old San Juan blue cobblestones
Yonex Ezone 100L Tennis Racquet: Look down, my loves. These are adoquines, blue-grey blocks laid through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, cast from furnace slag left over from iron smelting in Europe and carried across the Atlantic as ballast in Spanish vessels, then given a second life as a street. Waste, sent to sea, arriving beautiful. Their colour deepens when wet, so the whole city blushes in the rain. The old town sits on an islet at the mouth of the bay, founded in 1521 after the settlement moved from Caparra, enclosed by walls and entered through the massive Puerta de San Juan, with around four hundred restored buildings from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries inside.
04
Stop four
Casa Blanca
Yonex Ezone 100L Tennis Racquet: A house built for a man who never came home. Casa Blanca was raised in 1521 for Juan Ponce de Leon, the first governor of Puerto Rico, who died in Florida before he could ever occupy it, and his family stayed on for more than two centuries, long enough to make it the oldest continuously occupied residence in the Americas for much of that time. The original wooden structure burned and was rebuilt in masonry in 1523. Spanish and then American military commanders lived here until 1966. It is a museum of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century domestic life now, its terraced gardens falling toward the bay in fountains, still waiting.
Ten strings in five courses, and the whole instrument weighs almost nothing. That is the tradition I come from, so of course I am the light one: 285 grams unstrung, a 100 square inch head, a 16×19 pattern, 27 inches long, balance at 325 millimetres. Fifteen grams under the standard model, and those fifteen grams live in your shoulder at four o'clock on a hot afternoon.
Light does not mean weak. It means the head arrives on time. I get there early everywhere from a fast return of serve to the fourth overhead of a long doubles point, and by the way, that matters more than usual in San Juan, where the sea air is heavy, the afternoon is long, and the courts do not cool down until well after the tourists have gone.
San Juan built the heaviest walls in the Americas and then filled the streets inside them with the lightest music on earth. Six levels of fortress on one side, a cuatro on a balcony on the other, and nobody here finds that a contradiction. A light frame behind a big serve is the same arrangement. San Juan has been proving it works for four hundred years.
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