Baseball is Puerto Rico’s most popular sport. After growing up there, MLB Hall of Famer Roberto Clemente spent his whole major league career with the Pittsburgh Pirates. He died tragically in a plane crash while making a humanitarian trip to his home of Puerto Rico in 1972, and the league named their annual award for “extraordinary character and community involvement” after him. It is still given to this day.

Puerto Rico is often thought of as an island, but it’s actually an archipelago, or a group of islands. One of those islands is known as Gilligan’s Island. Although its official name is Cayo Aurora, locals and tourists alike commonly refer to it by the nickname for its unspoiled nature and resemblance to the set of the popular American TV show from the 1960s.

Built in 1540, La Fortaleza is the oldest executive mansion in continuous use in the Americas, and is still the official residence of the Governor of Puerto Rico. The fort originally featured a circular tower and four stone walls, but it has since been expanded with a modernized facade. According to tradition, the governor climbs the tower to pledge an oath of loyalty in particularly dangerous times.

After working with Columbus in Hispaniola, Spain’s Juan Ponce de León was given permission to explore Puerto Rico. Ponce de León set up mining operations and established the town of Caparra, which was eventually moved to present-day San Juan. For a clue to how these European settlers viewed the territory, the literal definition of Puerto Rico is “Rich Port.”

The Taínos were the Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean and the eastern coast of South America, including Puerto Rico and Hispaniola, before European settlers began colonizing the islands. A subgroup of the Arawak peoples, the Taíno were the first group Christopher Columbus encountered when he arrived in the region in the late 15th century.

More than 110 years ago, El Yunque National Forest was protected as a federal reserve, and it remains the only tropical rainforest in the United States. Each year, approximately 1.2 million visitors travel to the rainforest in northern Puerto Rico, where they find endangered parrots, fruit bats, and tree frogs called coquí.

While similar to the U.S. flag, the Puerto Rican flag is actually based on the Cuban flag, but with the red and blue colors inverted. The current design was adopted in 1952. The single star represents the island itself, and it sits within blue that represents the sky and the ocean.

Even though Puerto Rico is part of the U.S., several other sovereign states are geographically closer. About 1,150 miles separate the South Florida coast and Puerto Rico, while the Dominican Republic sits only about 200 miles directly to the west of Puerto Rico. Haiti, Cuba, Jamaica, the Turks and Caicos Islands, and the Bahamas all sit between Puerto Rico and the U.S.

San Juan is the capital and most populous city in Puerto Rico, home to more than 335,000 people, or a little more than 10% of the island’s total population. Founded in 1521, the city is located on Puerto Rico’s northern coast, in the Northern Coastal Plains region, and is a major port city, cultural hub, and tourist attraction.

Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Hispaniola, and Cuba make up the Greater Antilles, while the Lesser Antilles consist of countries such as Barbados, Grenada, St. Lucia, and Trinidad and Tobago. Puerto Rico is the smallest and easternmost island of the Greater Antilles. The U.S. island territory is home to approximately 3.1 million people.