Time travel

Funny how you can live in a place for almost a lifetime and still find locations that are brand new and awe inspiring to you, as if you were in another country.

That's the case of the Centro Ceremonial Indígena de Caguana, which my husband and I accidentally stumbled upon last week while taking the long, long way and driving through the mountain range that splits the island in two, on our way to Guánica in the south western side.

Despite having lived almost half of my life in Puerto Rico, I had never -- until this past visit -- stepped onto the eerie and spellbinding place, which is ensconced high in the mountains of Utuado in Barrio Caguana.

It is believed that the Taínos, the indigenous inhabitants of Boriquén (as Puerto Rico was called by its true "discoverers"), played their ball games and worshipped their gods at this site. Caguana is a very large expanse of land, which was in use well before Christopher Columbus thought he had discovered Puerto Rico in 1493.

Clearly a place of large-scale ceremony and ritual, Caguana is believed to have been an important religious center to which thousands would flock from neighboring villages (and perhaps even islands) to participate in obviously significant social and spiritual ceremonies.

I found visiting the beautiful grounds at Caguana a bit disturbing because of the sheer magnitude of being in a place that has survived since perhaps before the 13th century. The hieroglyphics are quite worn and it's now hard to discern the shapes of animals, birds and other creatures etched in the stone, but you can still make out a shape here and there and they truly take your breath away.

An old and majestic ceiba also regales the place, providing an appropriate frame for the Cemí Mountains in the distance, which happen (or is it really coincidence?) to be shaped like the Taínos' main god-symbol, the cemí, with one large mountain in the middle and two smaller heads at its ends.

The silence of the place is striking, even with tourists and visitors busy taking pictures and expressing their awe and wonder at the sights. Most people whisper, as if they were in church, intuiting the religious weightiness of their surroundings.

I almost convinced myself that I could feel the lingering presence of the people who centuries ago made Caguana a place alive and bursting with the chatter and games of families and friends, all gathered for a day or days of celebration.

It's incredible (and a little shameful) that it took more than four decades for me to visit Caguana. But that time frame is nothing compared to the likely 800 years the center has stood as a silent witness of those who came and lived and loved and laughed before us.