Puerto Rico live webcams

The first island on this site

Puerto Rico is the smallest of the Greater Antilles and an easy trip from the United States: as a U.S. territory, it needs no passport for American citizens. Most visitors land in San Juan and stay on its beaches, and that is where most of the island's live cams are: a resort and a beach club on Isla Verde, an independent camera over Condado Lagoon and a marina camera in Fajardo, the island's boating capital at the eastern tip.

San Juan and the northeast coast

San Juan and its neighbor Carolina hold the airport, the old city and the beach hotels of Condado and Isla Verde, minutes from each other. East of them the coast runs past the mangroves of Piñones, the Camarero racetrack at Canóvanas and the mountains of El Yunque to the marinas of Fajardo and to Ceiba, where the ferries leave for Culebra and Vieques. Public beaches with lifeguards and facilities, known here as balnearios, line the whole stretch.

Cameras you won't find elsewhere

Part of what makes Puerto Rico different is who is watching. The U.S. Geological Survey photographs Isla Verde beach every hour to study coastal flooding, and NEON, a national ecological observatory, keeps cameras in the dry forest of Guánica, the farm valley of Lajas and a mountain stream near Adjuntas. They show a side of the island most visitors never see: cactus scrub, pasture and tree ferns instead of hotel pools.

The dry southwest

The Cordillera Central blocks the rain carried by the trade winds, so the south coast lies in a rain shadow: cactus scrub in Guánica, irrigated pasture in the Lajas Valley. Up in the mountains around Adjuntas the air is cool and coffee grows on the slopes. The research cameras there photograph the vegetation every 15 minutes, so they change with the seasons, not by the minute: the dry months from about December to April against the green of the rains. The fishing village of La Parguera, with its mangrove channels and bioluminescent bay, is a natural base between Guánica and Lajas.

When to watch Puerto Rico

The island keeps Atlantic Standard Time all year, four hours behind UTC, with no daylight saving time. Mornings are usually the calmest on the north coast; winter brings the big northern swells, and the hurricane season runs from June to November.