PUERTO RICO: Tourist Card

Puerto Rico—once a U.S. poorhouse in the Caribbean and lately a busy island workshop—is turning into a chic winter resort. Next week. 20 miles from downtown San Juan, Laurance Rockefeller’s $9,000,000 Dorado Beach will open its doors, outclassing the smartest resorts of Jamaica. Antigua and Barbados.

Dorado Beach has 136 rooms in nine two-story beach houses. Rooms start at $45 daily, sleeping cabanas at $35. Guests get breakfast, dinner, two miles of reef and beach, 1,250 acres planted largely to flowers and specimen trees, three cork-topped tennis courts. They also get an 18-hole golf course designed by Robert Trent Jones and supervised by Ed Dudley, formerly President Eisenhower’s pro at the Augusta National. Surfaced in a fine-strained Bermuda grass, the course winds along 7,110 yards of lake, coconut grove, ocean, ends at a Spanish-colonial mansion remodeled into a clubhouse. It goes into use Dec. 4 with a $35,000 invitational tourney for some 30 top pros.

A week later, a second new hotel will open—the 297-room, $7,200,000 twelve-story La Concha (The Seashell) on the San Juan beachfront. With a casino, eight restaurants and cocktail lounges, a sea-shell-shaped nightclub set by surf’s edge. La Concha is aimed to please the crowd bored with Miami and scared of going to Havana because of the Cuban rebellion. The Puerto Rican government built the hotel for $6,000,000. leased it for two-thirds of the net to Associated Federal Hotels, a Southwestern chain (Phoenix’s Westward Ho, San Antonio’s Gunter), which spent another $1,200,000 on furnishings. (A similar deal for San Juan’s Caribe Hilton, which has been a consistent moneymaker, will net the government about $1,500,000 this year.)

Other big hotels are in prospect. In

Manhattan last week the Sheraton chain (48 hotels) contracted to operate a 450-room hotel that, at 18 stories, will become the island’s tallest building. Also in construction or on blueprints: the 174-room Intercontinental in Ponce, the island’s second city; the $15 million Imperial in San Juan; a pair of Hotel Corp. of America branches—one of 350 rooms in San Juan, another of 176 rooms in its suburb, Santurce.

Puerto Rico’s warm sun (362 days yearly; 78° mean temperature, only 6° variation between summer and winter) alone had not melted the hotelmen; they had studied Puerto Rico’s tourist prospects. In eleven years tourism has jumped sixfold to become Puerto Rico’s third industry, with a $31 million annual volume —more than the tourist trade of all the South American countries combined.

An important drawing card is the biggest airline-fare bargain in the world. For the $90 economy round-trip fare, the tourist can go from Manhattan to San Juan and return—a total of 3,200 miles at a cost of 2.8¢ per mile v. 2.9¢ per mile for an average Manhattan subway ride. The cheap fare, aimed originally at migrating Puerto Ricans. now attracts an estimated 60,000 tourists a year.