Caguana, the Taíno ceremonial courts

Taíno ball courts ringed with carved stones that may track the planets

Beside the Tanamá River in Utuado, the Taíno built one of the largest and most important pre-Columbian sites in the West Indies around 1270: about 13 ceremonial ball courts and plazas, the bateyes, edged with stone monoliths, some weighing more than a ton, most likely brought up from the river. On those stones is the largest concentration of petroglyphs in the Antilles, among them a heron-like bird and Atabeyra, the Caguana woman, taken to be the fertility goddess Atabey. Many of the carvings show the moon, stars and planets, and the layout of the courts appears aligned with particular astronomical events, so the site may have been used to watch, and perhaps predict, the transits, conjunctions and alignments of planets and stars. UNESCO’s Astronomy and World Heritage Initiative recognises its archaeoastronomy. Locals once called it Corrales de los Indios for the corral-like courts. The Institute of Puerto Rican Culture bought it in 1965 and runs it as the Caguana Indigenous Ceremonial Center, with a small museum of Taíno pieces that reopened in 2024 and a garden of the plants the Taíno grew.