Consider permission permanently granted to be outlandish: other towns may surprise you, but in San Francisco you will surprise yourself. Good times and social revolutions tend to start here, from manic gold rushes to blissful hippie be-ins. If there’s a skateboard move yet to be busted, a technology still unimagined, a poem left unspoken or a green scheme untested, chances are it’s about to happen here. Yes, right now. This town has lost almost everything in earthquakes and dot-com gambles, but never its nerve.

Grab your coat and a handful of glitter, and enter the land of fog and fabulousness. So long, inhibitions; hello, San Francisco.

Food & Drink

Every available Bay Area–invented technology is needed to make dinner decisions in this city, with the most restaurants and farmers markets per capita in North America, supplied by pioneering local organic farms. San Francisco set the gold standard for Wild West saloons, but drinking was driven underground in the 1920s with Prohibition. Today, San Francisco celebrates its speakeasies and vintage saloons – and with Wine Country and local distillers providing a steady supply of America’s finest hooch, the West remains wild.

Natural Highs

California is one grand, sweeping gesture – a long arm hugging the Pacific – and the 7-by-7-mile peninsula of San Francisco is a thumb pointed optimistically upwards. Take this as a hint to look up: you’ll notice San Francisco’s crooked Victorian rooflines, wind-sculpted treetops and fog tumbling over the Golden Gate Bridge.Heads are perpetually in the clouds atop San Francisco’s 43 hills. Cable cars provide easy access to Russian and Nob Hills, and splendid panoramas reward the slog up to Coit Tower – but the most exhilarating highs are earned on Telegraph Hill’s garden-lined stairway walks and windswept hikes around Land’s End.

Neighborhood Microclimates

Microclimates add magic realism to San Francisco days: when it’s drizzling in the outer reaches of Golden Gate Park, it might be sunny in the Mission. A few degrees’ difference between neighborhoods grants permission for salted-caramel ice cream in Dolores Park, or a hasty retreat to tropical heat inside the California Academy of Sciences’ rainforest dome. This town will give you goose bumps one minute, and warm you to the core the next.

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In early September 2017, Puerto Rico anxiously prepared for two catastrophic hurricanes that threatened its shores. Hurricane Irma came first, wrecking the islands of Culebra and Vieques and causing serious damage and flooding along the country’s northeastern coast. Just a week later, Hurricane Maria made a more direct impact, becoming the strongest hurricane to hit Puerto Rico in 89 years. While Maria’s blow may have immobilized the island temporarily, Puerto Ricans continue to persevere as relief efforts mobilize and recovery begins. Borinquen has weathered many storms, and it will weather this one too.

Caribbean Beaches

Puerto Rico inspires Caribbean daydreams for good reason: it can satisfy both the lethargic beach bum and the budding big-wave surfer – all in a long weekend. Its coral reefs host a riot of fantastical fish and the shores shimmer like crushed pearls. On some beaches you’ll have plenty of company. In other places like Vieques or Cabo Rojo you might have some of the world’s best stretches of sand entirely to yourself. If the sands that rim the island tempt you to stay, you can opt for sizeable resorts or independent guesthouses for watching those seaside sunsets from your room.

Scented by slow-roasted pork and sea breezes, and colored by swashbuckling history, this sun-washed medley of Spanish and American influences is a paradise-seeker’s pleasure dome.

Cultural Vibrancy

The island’s culture is of the visceral kind. You’ll need to search for it beyond the condo towers and congested roads, and sometimes it seems Puerto Rico does not wish to show outsiders its cultural magnitude. Then, suddenly, you’ll smell it in the smoke arising from lechoneras (eateries specializing in suckling pig), or hear it in the intoxicating patters of salsa beats. You’ll glimpse it as sunlight sparkles across coffee plantations, or in museums celebrating everything from failed revolution to classical European painting. Puerto Rican traditions have been shaped by generations of cultural synthesis, celebration and setback, and it emerges today as vivid and indomitable.

Happening History

Puerto Rico’s present appears laid-back but its past brims with cannon fire and colonization, repression and revolt. Legend abounds: from San Juan’s fortresses, scoured by siege, to the crumbling South Coast sugar refineries once powering the island’s economy. European settlers built pretty plazas in harbor cities while political revolutionaries schemed rebellion in mountain villages. History enthusiasts can wander precolonial Taíno ruins or coffee haciendas. Even if your interest is scant, it’s hard not to get immersed in Puerto Rico’s tempestuous story in Old San Juan, where enticing echoes of bygone times – of colonists and swashbucklers and smugglers – reverberate still.

Forest Thrills

Even those who stick to the coast cannot escape the alluring shadow of Puerto Rico’s thick forests, as knotted labyrinths of mangroves create crucial shoreside wildlife reserves and the green glint of the inland forested hills is rarely out of sight.The island’s dense foliage invites a perpetual mystery to blanket it, as coqui frogs chant among giant tree ferns and roots reduce so-called roads to rubble. The forests here are internationally important, such as El Yunque, the only tropical rainforest in the US. A journey into them guarantees to awaken the adventurer within.

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