Well, its been a few weeks since Noche de San Juan and I waited a while to post this so I could see if there was anything in the Press about developing the event into a tourism attraction.
Nothing.
Noche de San Juan was very nice.
We walked over to Condado at about 10pm and people were starting to accumulate along the beach. At about 11pm, police were positioned at all the dead-end streets that go to the beach to keep cars from entering to search for parking.
By 11:30 – there was a steady stream of people going to the beach.
The center of activity seemed to be the Atlantic Beach Hotel which had lights on a small portion of the beach.
There was no activity at all at The Marriott or the La Ventana al Mar park on either end of Condado’s beach.
At about 5 minutes til midnight, thousands of people ran into the waves and at the countdown to midnight threw themselves into the waves. There were fireworks for about 5 minutes that could be seen from Ultimo Trolley Beach in Ocean Park.
Everyone was well behaved, everyone had a great time..
Almost everyone was between 20 – 40 years old.
Some of the bathing suits were quite amazing for midnight!
How often do you get a mass gathering of that age group without music, dancing and drink?
By 12:30, everyone was headed home…
So – while it was a very nice local event – most tourists probably didn’t even know it was going on… a major cultural event that probably went unnoticed by most of the world.
Could it be that people in the tourism industry don’t see the potential?
How many other great local celebrations throughout the Caribbean are ignored by the tourism industry? Tourists I meet all over the Caribbean crave local culture within easy access of their hotel.