The Main Plaza
This is Castillo San Felipe del Morro’s main plaza, called the plaza de armas. Completed around 1780, it looked then much as you see it now. This plaza witnessed the activities of daily life in a Spanish fortress for more than a century.
On the plaza floor in front of you troops drilled, stood inspections, and assembled for formal events. The large, vaulted rooms that surround the plaza, called casemates, housed a kitchen, chapel, storage areas, officers’ quarters, and barracks for enlisted men. Some outer casemates were used for firing cannon. The center of the plaza contains a wellhead, to which soldiers came to draw water from three large cisterns beneath the plaza.
During the late 1700’s and most of the 1800s, this plaza was a very busy place.
Marker is on Cll Del Morro.
Courtesy hmdb.org
