La Fortaleza was built to guard San Juan’s harbour and turned out to be rather poor at it. The Spanish raised the small medieval-style fortress, with its two round towers, between 1533 and 1540. Within a few years they concluded El Morro would do the job better, and by 1544 La Fortaleza had become the governor’s residence, a post it still holds.

Its fortress career was dismal. The Earl of Cumberland took it in 1598, and fire damaged it. The Dutch left it scorched again in 1625. Rebuilt between 1840 and 1846, it has housed no fewer than 170 governors and is the oldest governor’s mansion still used as such in the Western Hemisphere.

VoiceMap’s Talking Buildings of Old San Juan lets the mansion narrate its own story in the first person, explaining how a failed fortress became the governor’s home.