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Each Caribbean island, however small, has its own distinct atmosphere. A Caribbean traveller could be dropped anywhere, unforewarned, and it would be obvious in an instant which one it was. Puerto Rico is Latin and Stateside American duality - on the one hand it’s salsa music, rice and peas, macho swagger and flounce; and then it’s yellow traffic lines and signs and hanging lights, kerthunk, kerthunk on the concrete freeway, serious billboards.

I can’t imagine why the mention of the States should make me think of automobiles and traffic, but I’ll admit I do love to drive around Puerto Rico. I just set the stereo to Radio Sol and go, to a blare of salsa music - relentless bustle and brass, wandering snatches of piano, all underpinned with a double tap of timbale drum. On a recent visit, trying to reach my hotel in Old San Juan, I found myself transfixed by a woman in a shop window. She was waltzing in time, moving a mannequin.

Really the very notion of driving in Old San Juan is a silly one -it has some of the slowest traffic jams I have ever known. Instead it is prime territory for walking. It is small, limited in size by the perfect defensive promontory on which it was built in the early 1500s. It is very well preserved and its massive stone walls are mostly still in place.

Old San Juan is also exceedingly pretty. The streets are laid with blue-grey adequine cobbles and the tall facades of its houses jangle pleasantly, light blue and lemon yellow juxtaposed with navy, beige and green. Walls ring with architectural flourishes: balconies of cast-iron or lacquered spindles, windows and doorframes picked out in white, decorated lintels and tympana and the occasional ojo de toro (bull’s eye), a circular hole in the wall which, in the days before air-conditioning, encouraged a through-flow of air. Courtyards are private here, but you can snatch glimpses of them through opening doors, or in some restaurants, which use them to their best advantage. The Southern Spanish heritage is visible in the arches and stairs with patterned tiles.

You can feel how the city developed. As you near the headland, the tight streets of houses and shops give way to the large official buildings and parade grounds. Near the point, the Governor’s residence sells itself, in the spirit of modern hype, as ‘the oldest executive mansion still used as such in the Western Hemisphere’ (so there!). My hotel was among them, in a former convent, four layers of arches around a courtyard large enough for trees and restaurants and shops. Close by is the Cathedral, burial place of Juan Ponce de Leon, the explorer who spent half a lifetime searching for the Fountain of Youth in the New World. A corner altar, dedicated to El Divino Nino (the Christ child), says so much about Puerto Rico. This is where young Puerto Ricans come to pray for the gift of children. They leave flowers and folded notes in a basket at his feet.

Old San Juan makes most of its living from tourism, and much of it from cruise ships, so the streets are sometimes overrun with sneakers, shorts and tightly-stretched T-shirts, but once you hear the flatulent thrum of sirens in the late afternoon, the shops shut up and the Puerto Ricans themselves emerge and fill up the restaurants and bars.

The liveliest street is Calle San Sebastian at the top of the hill above the Cathedral. In times past this was the chattering ground of all good Puerto Rican revolutionaries, who came to take the evening air and discuss politics, an essential Puerto Rican pastime. Politics usually centres on their relationship with the USA (they have never had the independence of most Caribbean islands; Puerto Rico was simply handed to the Americans by treaty in 1898 at the end of the Spanish-American war). Calle San Sebastian still heaves, though the revolutionary fervour seems to have evaporated. Many of these drinkers weren’t even sure if they were going to vote in the recent plebiscite, let alone which option to select. They were too busy taking the evening air, in a car-borne version of the promenade.

A mere seven blocks, Old San Juan holds much of the mystery and romance of Puerto Rico, but not to explore would be idle. It doesn’t begin well; ‘new’ San Juan, which starts at the end of the promontory, is a spaghetti of tarmac and jostling high-rise hotels, but beyond here the tarmac cruises into the same jungle-like magnificence as the rest of the Caribbean. Of course, this being America, you need a car to get around. I selected Radio Sol and set off, passing the pitching range where machines hurl baseballs, to a blast of brass.

Some landscapes are magnificent for their sweep and distance, but it is the opposite in the steep-sided valleys of the Caribbean. Here the glory is in the detail: explosions of banana, curtains of grass, vines on the run. Valleys are so narrow that on a still day you can hear a man cough from one side to the other.

Rural Puerto Rico has much the same atmosphere as other Caribbean islands, with children dressed in tartan spilling out of school (and yellow buses in this case) and lone cattle dragging a tether, guarded by a white egret. But the material benefits of the connection with the USA are overwhelming. In so many islands the houses are wood, here every one is made of concrete.

The expansive suburbs of San Juan have plenty of Taco Bells and burger joints, but out in the country you will find Puerto Rican specialities. The town of Cayey is known for its lechoneras, where they roast suckling pig. They are seasoned with garlic, peppers and oregano, roasted on a spit over a barbecue and then, to the smack of a machete on a chopping board, they are served up with plantains, pumpkin and rice.

Meandering back to San Juan I followed the coast road around the rain-forested mountains of the island’s eastern end. On the outskirts of a village a bar was getting ready for an evening’s entertainment. The music system was up and running already, huge stacks of speakers standing either side of the road. As I approached I found that Radio Sol underwent an unexpected, almost ghostly transition. The salsa gathered around me and swelled in the car, crammed slightly by the Doppler effect, until it burst out of the open window, filling the open road. For five seconds it hovered like surround-sound - the shift and tick of the cheese-grater in the air above, the piano jiggling at head height and the double drumbeat reverberating through the chassis and wheels. Then as I passed it waned and faded, slid back into the car and re-boxed itself in the radio. Magic.

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