Captainty General of Puerto Rico

The Captainty General of Puerto Rico was an administrative district of the Spanish Empire created in 1582 to give the island a military command of its own, freed from the governor, the Audiencia of Santo Domingo and the Viceroyalty of New Spain. Its purpose was Spain's last, and ultimately futile, Habsburg attempt to keep rival European powers out of the Caribbean. San Juan, refounded from Ponce de León's abandoned Caparra, became a fortress city: Casa Blanca's walls were reinforced in the 1520s, La Fortaleza rose at the mouth of the bay, and from 1539 the circuit of Morro, San Cristóbal and San Gerónimo was built around the town. Francis Drake's twenty-seven ship squadron attacked in 1595 and was driven off, and the island served as a bastion against Caribbean piracy for two centuries. Alejandro O'Reilly's 1765 reforms paid and professionalised the garrison and counted 44,883 inhabitants, 5,037 of them enslaved. Sugar and coffee consolidated the economy in the nineteenth century, while the liberal institutions promised by the 1812 constitution were withdrawn, and the abortive Grito de Lares of 1868 was followed by a generation of instability that ended when Spain lost the war of 1898 and ceded the island to the United States.