There are few places in the world where the sea lights up. La Parguera is one of them. When night falls over this fishing village in southwest Puerto Rico and the boats venture among the mangroves, every paddle, every hand that grazes the water and every wake the boat leaves unleashes a blue-green glow that seems impossible: the water, literally, lights up. It's not magic or mineral phosphorescence, but life. Millions of dinoflagellates — microorganisms so tiny they can't be seen with the naked eye — emit light when agitated, and in the sheltered bay of La Parguera they concentrate as in very few corners of the planet.
But reducing La Parguera to its bioluminescent bay would be staying at the surface. This small ward of the municipality of Lajas is, above all, a seaside town: it was born of fishing, grew up looking at the water and keeps an appearance found nowhere else on the island, with its wooden houses on stilts planted among the cays, its labyrinth of channels and mangroves and its boardwalk smelling of fried seafood. It's also, though many don't know it, one of the great marine-biology laboratories in the Caribbean. Behind its calm waters lie two centuries of history: that of the families who founded the village, that of the luminous phenomenon that made it famous, that of the scientists who studied it and that of the tension, still alive, between tourism, construction and the conservation of a fragile and unique ecosystem.
La Parguera was born as a modest fishing village on the south coast of the municipality of Lajas, in southwest Puerto Rico, during the first quarter of the 19th century. The founding is placed around 1826, when families from Lajas and neighboring Cabo Rojo, drawn by adventure, the desire for economic improvement, the abundance of fish and the beauty of the coast, arrived at the place and built their first homes by the sea.
Among the first settlers were the Cancel, Pabón, Rodríguez, Ramos and Avilés families; it's estimated that barely a dozen families made up the original core of the settlement. Gregorio Pabón, one of those first colonists, served as commissioner of the ward throughout his life, a post that reflected the simple organization of these coastal communities of the island's interior.
From its origins, La Parguera's economy revolved around fishing, established as an industry from the first moment, along with corn farming and the raising of cattle and horses. The place's name itself comes from the 'pargo' (snapper), the fish abundant in its waters that gave sustenance to those first settlers and that ended up naming the settlement.
La Parguera's great leap toward tourism is due, in large part, to a spectacular natural phenomenon: its bioluminescent bay. In the calm, sheltered waters of the shoreline, surrounded by mangroves, dinoflagellates thrive, microorganisms that emit a blue-green light when the water is agitated. As night falls, the movement of the boats, the paddles or the hands produces luminous flashes that seem straight out of a fairy tale.
Puerto Rico has three notable bioluminescent bays — La Parguera's, Vieques's Mosquito Bay and Fajardo's Laguna Grande — and La Parguera's was for decades one of the most visited and best known. The possibility of going out at night by boat to watch the water glowing made the town a popular destination for both Puerto Ricans and tourists.
Over time, the growing awareness of the fragility of this phenomenon and the need to protect the mangroves and the water quality led to greater care for the environment and to regulating the activity. The bioluminescence, along with the daytime tours of the cays, consolidated La Parguera as one of the great nature attractions of the Porta Caribe region.
La Parguera's seafront, with its labyrinth of cays, channels and mangrove forests, constitutes an ecosystem of great ecological value that has been the object of protection. The area is part of a reserved natural area that protects the mangroves, the waters and the marine wildlife — fish, birds and coral life — characteristic of the southwest coast of Puerto Rico, in a setting where tourism coexists with conservation.
One of the most curious and recognizable features of the La Parguera landscape are its 'casetas': summer houses built over the water, among the cays and channels, which were raised over time and are part of the place's unique appearance. Along with the docks, the mangroves and the small islands, they give La Parguera an identity found nowhere else on the island.
Today La Parguera combines its fishing heritage with very active nature tourism: boat and kayak trips through the cays and mangroves, snorkeling and diving on reefs and underwater walls, and, above all, the nighttime excursions to the bioluminescent bay. Its lively boardwalk, its seafood restaurants and its protected setting have made it one of the essential destinations in the south of Puerto Rico.
A little-known but fundamental chapter in the history of La Parguera is its role as a center of marine scientific research. Since 1954, the Department of Marine Sciences of the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez (UPRM) has operated a marine biology station on Isla Magueyes, a small cay off the town, taking advantage of the exceptional diversity of habitats in the area — mangroves, seagrass meadows, coral reefs and the bioluminescent bay itself — to study tropical coastal ecosystems. For more than seven decades, generations of scientists and marine researchers, Puerto Rican and international, passed through its laboratories, which made this humble fishing town an academic reference in Caribbean oceanography.
That scientific calling coexisted, not always without tensions, with the growth of tourism. The increase in visitors to the bioluminescent bay and the cays, added to light pollution and construction over the water, generated concern about the impact on water quality and on the concentration of dinoflagellates responsible for the luminous phenomenon, which in some periods showed signs of weakening compared to that of other bays on the island, like Vieques's Mosquito Bay.
This led to reinforcing the protection measures: the designation of much of the area as a nature reserve under the Department of Natural and Environmental Resources (DRNA), the regulation of the nighttime excursions and the promotion of biodegradable sunscreens among visitors. Today La Parguera is at once a consolidated tourist destination and a reminder of the need to balance development with the conservation of an ecosystem unique in the world.
Anyone arriving in La Parguera for the first time is surprised to see wooden houses planted literally over the water, among the mangroves and the cays, held up by stilts. These are the 'casetas', the most singular — and most controversial — feature of the La Parguera landscape. They began to be built in the mid-20th century as simple summer houses of families who wanted to spend weekends by the sea, and over time they multiplied: a 1993 inventory counted about 161 structures of this type scattered along the town's shoreline.
The curious thing is who occupies them. Far from being homes of humble fishermen, the casetas ended up belonging mostly to well-off seasonal residents — engineers, doctors, lawyers, businesspeople and even a federal judge — in a phenomenon that some researchers have described, not without irony, as that of 'deluxe squatters'. Many were built without clear title on lands that are public maritime-terrestrial property, which placed them for decades in a legal gray area.
Hence the controversy. Their location in the water makes them very vulnerable to hurricanes, and above all raises a deeper environmental conflict: for many environmentalists, the casetas affect the mangroves, the water quality and the marine life of a protected nature reserve, and should be removed; for their owners and much of the town, they're part of the identity and history of La Parguera. The debate over what to do with them remains open, and sums up like few others the permanent tension of the place: that of an extraordinary ecosystem that bears the weight of its own popularity.