Old San Juan is a city of stories, and two of the best are attached to places most cruise visitors walk straight past. One is a tiny chapel at the dead end of the most famous street in the city. The other is a lonely stone lookout on the seaward side of Castillo San Cristóbal. Both take about ten minutes to visit and both are free to stand in front of.
The Capilla del Cristo and the horse race
Calle del Cristo runs downhill from the cathedral and stops abruptly at a small domed chapel built right into the city wall, with the harbor dropping away behind it. That spot is the Capilla del Cristo, the Chapel of Christ of Health, and the legend of why it is there goes like this.
In the 1700s the street was used for horse races during the city’s patron saint festivities. In one race a young rider named Baltazar Montañez lost control at the bottom of the hill, and horse and rider went over the edge of the wall. A bystander, a city official named Tomás Mateo Pratts, is said to have cried out to the Christ of Health for a miracle. Depending on who tells it, the rider survived the fall or did not, and Pratts had the chapel built on the exact spot of the accident in thanks, or in memory.
Historians are not so sure. Puerto Rico’s best-known early historian, Cayetano Coll y Toste, found a real Baltazar Montañez in the records and noted that the accident itself does not appear anywhere. What is documented is the chapel: a small Spanish Baroque building with a silver-and-gold altar and paintings by the island’s great 18th-century painter José Campeche. The altar pieces date to the 1750s. A protective gate was added in the 1940s, and the chapel is opened to the public only on a limited schedule, so most visitors see the interior through the bars, which is still worth the walk.
Right beside the chapel is the Parque de las Palomas, the pigeon park, with one of the best harbor views in the city. If you are following the self-guided walking tour, this is the natural turnaround point.
La Garita del Diablo, the Devil’s Sentry Box
The round stone sentry boxes that stick out from the walls, the garitas, are the unofficial symbol of Puerto Rico. You will see them on license plates, coffee bags and the Puerto Rico quarter. Most are a few steps from a fort’s main walls. One is not.
Below the northeast corner of Castillo San Cristóbal, at the end of a long, narrow tunnel and walkway, a single garita sits almost at sea level, facing the open Atlantic with the surf pounding below it. It was the most isolated post in the whole defense system, and the story is that soldiers assigned there had a habit of not coming back. The best-known version names a sentry called Sánchez, who was on duty one night and simply gone by morning, his rifle and uniform left behind. The soldiers decided the devil had taken him, and the name stuck. The less romantic version, which later storytellers added, is that he ran off with a local woman and let the devil take the blame.
The Devil’s Sentry Box is inside the San Cristóbal grounds, which are managed by the National Park Service as part of the San Juan National Historic Site. Access to the tunnel and the lower walkway has been open and closed at different times for safety and maintenance, so ask a ranger at the entrance whether it is reachable on the day you visit. Even from the upper ramparts you can look down and pick it out, alone on the rocks.
Why these two
Old San Juan has more legends than these, but these are the two you can stand inside of on a normal port day without a car or a tour. Both sit on the route most cruise passengers already walk, the chapel at the bottom of Calle del Cristo and the garita at the fort most people visit second. For the full comparison of the two forts, see El Morro vs San Cristóbal, and for everything else in reach of the piers, our Old San Juan port day guide.
