Although Puerto Rican cooking is somewhat similar to both Spanish and Mexican cuisine, it is a unique tasty blend of Spanish, African, Tano, and American influences, using such indigenous seasonings and ingredients as coriander, papaya, cacao, nispero, apio, plantains, and yampee. Locals calltheir cuisine "cocina criolla". Cocina Criolla (Crole cooking) can be traced back to the Arawaks andTainos, the original inhabitants of the island, who thrived on a diet of corn,tropical fruit, and seafood. When Ponce de Len arrived with Columbus in1493, the Spanish added beef, pork, rice, wheat, and olive oil to the island'sfoodstuffs. Soon after, the Spanish began planting sugarcane and importingslaves from Africa, who brought with them okra and taro (known in PuertoRico as yautia). The mingling of flavors and ingredients passed fromgeneration to generation among the different ethnic groups that settled onthe island, resulting in the exotic blend of today's Puerto Rican cuisine.MUSIC:One of Puerto Rico's notable exports is its music, which probably thepredominant Caribbean music heard in the United States. At least some ofthe instruments used in traditional Puerto Rican music originated with theTano people. Most noteworthy is the gicharo, or giro , a notchedhollowed-out gourd, which was adapted from pre-Columbian days. Themusical traditions of the Spanish and Africans can also be heard in PuertoRico's music. At least four different instruments were adapted from thesix-string Spanish classical guitar: the requinto, the bordonua, the cuatro,and the triple, each of which produces a unique tone and pitch. The mostpopular of these, and one for which greatest number of adaptions andcompositions have been written, is the cuatro, a guitar-like instrument with10 strings (arranged in five different pairs) whose name (translated as "thefourth") is derived from the tradition of tuning its strings in variables ofhalf-octaves (that is, fourths). Usually carve...
