Escapes: San Juan best experienced when immersed in the city’s past

But in historic San Juan I want history, and the Ritz-Carlton doesn’t have it. It doesn’t have a rich past, hardly a past at all. It opened in 1997, the year local angler Luis Viyella caught a record-breaking 895.5-pound marlin, and that’s about it for 1997 in San Juan.

So, here I am in Old San Juan — old as in about 500 years — one of the few places in the Western Hemisphere where you can see the distant past, walk on it and sleep in it.

I’m standing under an awning on the Paseo de la Princesa, a pedestrian walk spectacularly wedged between the harbor and the 20-foot-thick fortress walls built of sandstone blocks around the city between 1539 and 1641.

A summer squall is sending rain down on the bay as a mega-cruise ship passes the Castillo San Felipe del Morro.

It is exceptionally bad luck for the passengers because this is probably the best photo op on any Caribbean cruise. The formidable fort, positioned on a dramatic rock promontory at the entrance to the harbor, has been standing watch since 1539.

The rain is welcome in the summer heat, and I watch the ship maneuver into the harbor and dock alongside other cruise ships exactly where the Spanish fleet once tied up.

The rain stops within minutes and I continue to walk alongside the 40-foot-high wall and look up to admire the strategically placed turrets for sentries at the top.

Joggers run past and government workers eat lunches on benches facing the harbor and its continuous parade of expensive yachts, fishing boats and downcast container ships beat up by hard use and the ocean.

Soon, I arrive at the massive red Puerta de San Juan, the original gate to the Old City. On the other side of the gate is a narrow street paved with blue cobblestones polished by four centuries of footsteps and now glassy from the rain. The stones arrived on the island as ballast on Spanish ships.

The Cathedral of San Juan Bautista, built in 1540, stands stark and white against a blue sky, and commands the attention of anyone coming through the gate. Sailors through the centuries walked on the same stones up the hill to the church to give thanks for safe voyages.

The cathedral is best-known as the resting place for the bones of Juan Ponce de León. This is, after all, his city.

The muscular 33-year-old nobleman, dashing in thigh-high boots, leather vest and feathered hat, first stepped on the island in 1493 as a soldier on Christopher Columbus’ second voyage to the Caribbean. He built a settlement here and was named governor of the island by the Spanish crown in 1508. He died in 1521.

Adjacent to the cathedral on Cristo Street is the venerable El Convento, where I am staying. This is a hotel with a past.

This building opened in 1651 as the monastery of Our Lady Carmen of San José, a convent for Carmelite nuns who walked down its tile corridors, habits flowing in the breezes of the interior courtyard shaded by nispero trees. It housed nuns for 252 years.

Across the street is the little Plaza of the Nuns, the city’s second oldest park. The convent was closed in 1903, and for the next 40 years it was a derelict flophouse without electricity or running water.

In 1959, Robert Frederic Woolworth, heir to the Woolworth fortune, came to the rescue and converted it into an elegant inn. Today, it is a 58-room luxury hotel, but its long history is still intact including the original black and white marble floors and Spanish tiles, mahogany beams and views of the harbor.

A towering nispero tree, planted when the hotel opened, still grows in the courtyard.

Breakfast and lunch — gazpacho and mofongo (fried mashed green plantains with lots of garlic) filled with shrimp — is served in the shade of the tree. The hotel’s gourmet pizza restaurant is another option.

I have to pace myself at El Picoteo. The hotel’s romantic restaurant, where reservations are highly recommended, serves a range of tapas such as gambas al ajillo, sauteed shrimp in garlic sauce; empanadillas, Spanish sausage, cheese or lobster wrapped in flaky pastry; Spanish tortillas, and then the main course — paella.

At one of the late-afternoon wine receptions served on the hotel’s terrace overlooking the cathedral, I learned that a half-dozen couples were here on their honeymoons, which isn’t surprising.

Entertainment during a stay at El Convento always includes walking the cobblestone streets around the hotel and admiring more than 400 restored 16th- and 17th-century Spanish colonial buildings. The hotel is within easy walking distance of the National Gallery, the San Cristobal Fortress, the Pablo Casals Museum and El Morro. The popular Puerto Rican Children’s Museum is next door.

The hotel’s tiny rooftop pool awaits on hot afternoons and offers fantastic views of the Old City and the cruise ships cruising into the harbor.

Ponce de León would probably feel right at home in much of Old San Juan, but the cruise ships might take some getting used to.