Santurce
Santurce is one of the districts (or barrios) of San Juan. It is also the biggest and most populated of all the capital’s districts. With a total population of 94,067, Santurce has a bigger population than most of the municipalities of Puerto Rico. As a result, it is also one of the most densely populated areas of the island (17,955.7 persons per square mile). It includes the neighborhoods of Miramar, Loíza, Isla Grande, Barrio Obrero, and Condado, which are cultural hot spots for art, music, cuisine, fashion, hotels, technology, multimedia, film, textile and startups.
Geographically speaking, Santurce is a peninsula that is attached to the mainland in the east, where it borders with the Isla Verde district of Carolina. It is 7.6 km long from west to east, and up to 3.0 km wide in the eastern part.
The peninsula is bounded by the Atlantic Ocean in the north, with more than five km of beaches from the Condado peninsula in the west, to a point 600 m east of “Punta Las Marías”, where it borders on the Isla Verde area, and “Laguna San José” and its northern embayment, “Laguna Los Corozos” to the east.
To the south by the Martín Peña Channel, and the northern barrios of former municipio Río Piedras (Hato Rey Norte, Hato Rey Central, Oriente), and to the west with the “Bahia of San Juan”, where three bridges, “Puente Dos Hermanos” (Avenida Ashford), “Puente G. Esteves” (Avenida Ponce de León) and “Puente San Antonio” (Avenida Fernandes Juncos) connect Santurce with “La Isleta” (small island) where Old San Juan is located. It has a total area of 8.70 square miles (22.5 km2) composed of 5.24 square miles (13.6 km2) of land and 3.46 square miles (9.0 km2) of water area.
In contrast to the more cosmopolitan, tourist-friendly Condado area, Santurce became a sleepy, mostly working-class neighborhood that in recent decades fell into disrepair. Just a 15-minute drive from areas like Old San Juan, Condado and Isla Verde, Santurce is dotted with dilapidated low-rise buildings that sit next to modest shops and unhip old-school bars. But thanks to the abundance of affordable real estate and gritty charms, in recent years it began attracting exhibition spaces, music halls and design studios. These creative new residents are bestowing freshness on the neighborhood, which is beginning to rival Old San Juan as an arts district.