What changed on Vieques and Culebra

Our holidays and Holy Week pages said that a ferry website with nothing on sale “is not a full boat” but a spent online block, as if seats at the window were certain. Puerto Rico Ferry releases more tickets on the day of the sailing, and passengers can buy at the window “depending on available capacity”. So an empty website does not mean a full boat, and it does not promise a seat either.

Both pages now say that more seats are released at the window on the day, as capacity allows, and to go to the window early.

Our guide to where to stay on Vieques and Culebra opened by saying the two islands had “a few dozen guesthouses, small inns and villas.” That undercounted them badly. The guesthouses and small inns are few, but houses, villas and apartments rented out whole, by the week or the night, far outnumber them on both islands. The opening now names both, with no count, and a new paragraph says that most of the places to stay on both islands are rented houses and apartments.

For Vieques, that paragraph also points to Vrbo’s list of the island’s rentals, which now sits in the guide’s places to stay for Vieques, after Booking.com’s list, and carries Vieques rentals only. Vrbo pays us a commission on a booking made through that link, and the block it sits in says so. Our disclosure and privacy pages now name Vrbo, and the privacy page says what a click on its link does: it passes through CJ, the affiliate network that runs Vrbo’s program, and Vrbo credits us if you book within seven days and ours was the last link that took you there.

The guide’s section on registration now also says that Culebra’s town government has required its own license for short-term rentals since 2025, with fines of $500 to $1,000 for hosts who break the rule, so on Culebra ask the host for that license as well as the Tourism Company registration.

Our page on Mosquito Bay as a day trip from San Juan names two bio bay tours that plan for the 9:30 PM ferry, Mosquito Bio Bay Tours’ and Fun Brothers’, and said both of their times move with the sunset. Only Mosquito Bio Bay Tours’ does: its first tour is at 6:30 PM until the end of February and 7:00 PM from March.

Fun Brothers keeps its first tour of the night at 7:15 PM from January to August 2027, summer included, on every night but one: on 30 March it is at 7:00 PM. The page now says so.

The privacy page listed what Viator’s report shows us for each booking: the date it was made, the date of the trip, which trip it was, its total and our commission. That list was short. The report also shows Viator’s reference number for the booking, how many travelers it is for and the country Viator records for the customer; its status, whether it has been paid and, if it was canceled, when and by whom; which of our pages it is credited to; and, for some bookings, the exact link it came through.

It shows no name, no email address and no payment details, and the page still says so. It now names everything the report records about the customer: the country Viator records for them and how many people are traveling.

The privacy page said a click on one of our affiliate links takes you to Viator, and named Viator as the only booking company involved. Since 1 October 2026 this site has also carried links to places to stay on Booking.com, and those go through CJ (Commission Junction), the affiliate network that runs Booking.com’s program. The page now says what such a click does: it passes through CJ, which records it, on its way to Booking.com, and Booking.com credits us only if you book in that same visit.

It also said that what comes back to us is never “your name, your email, your payment details or what you booked”. The last part was wrong. Viator’s reports show us, for each booking, the date it was made, the date of the trip, which trip it was, its total and our commission. They carry no name, no email and no payment details, and the page now says exactly that.

Its short version said the only personal information we ever hold is an email address you typed in yourself. That left out what comes with the address. MailerLite, which stores our list, records the IP address a signup and its confirmation came from, and when, as its proof that the person asked to join, and, like most mailing services, it can record which of our emails each subscriber opens and which links they click. A message sent to hello@thespanishvirgins.com stays in our mailbox. The page now says all of this.

Three smaller corrections on the same page:

• SMTP2GO delivers our replies when you write to us. The page said it delivered the mailing list’s emails, which MailerLite sends.
• The list of services now also names Google, whose Gmail mailbox receives mail sent to hello@thespanishvirgins.com, and CJ and Booking.com. With them the list is complete.
• The click counter’s description now lists all six things it records, including the time of the click, and says how the country is found: Cloudflare reads it from your connection, and the address itself is never stored.

Isla Nena sells on Viator. Our page on which tours leave from the islands said Isla Nena Biobay Boat Tours, which runs the electric boat on Mosquito Bay, sold only on its own site. Its trip is on Viator, and our Mosquito Bay page links it.

I Ventures’ day from San Juan. Our Mosquito Bay day-trip page called I Ventures’ package a 12-hour trip that has you back in San Juan at about 11:30 PM and needs six guests to run. Its itinerary now lists the trip at 11 hours and has you back at about 11:45 PM. It names no minimum, though it can be canceled if too few guests book, and the page now says that instead.

Which bio bay tour starts at $57. The same page’s answer on cost, and the one on our page on which bio bay to choose, said the kayak and canoe tours start at $57 and $60, which put the lower price on the kayak. The clear canoe is the $57 trip, and the kayak starts at $60.

The canoe we called steadier. Five of our pages, and the canoe’s card, called Adventure Vieques’ clear canoes the steadier boat. Neither operator makes that claim. The pages now rest on what the listings do say: the canoe trip is run for all ages and experience levels and rated wheelchair accessible, while Alikei Adventures’ clear kayaks are two-person boats whose weight has to be split between the two paddlers so they do not flip. The canoe is still the trip we would book for children and first-time paddlers.

Our Culebra day-trip page and our Ceiba ferry page described East Island Excursions’ catamaran from Puerto del Rey marina as a snorkel-and-beach day, with snorkel gear included and a stop at a reef, and the Vieques-or-Culebra page said the catamaran day takes you snorkeling. Our snorkeling page sent readers to the Culebra day-trip page for the catamaran, as if it were the reef trip described there.

The catamaran we list is East Island’s beach day. Its listing says it is not a snorkeling tour and puts snorkel gear among the things not included, and East Island’s own page for the trip says the same. What it does include is lunch, snacks and drinks, with kayaks and paddleboards at the beach. The snorkeling description belonged to a different East Island trip, its snorkel catamaran, which we do not list.

All four pages, and the trip’s card, now describe it as a beach day, and the snorkeling page keeps the two trips apart. The rest of the warning stands: the captain picks the beach that morning, and in a rough sea the boat can go to Vieques or the cays off Fajardo instead of Culebra.

Our holiday page said the special Holy Week ferry schedules of recent years were announced only days ahead, and gave 2025 as the example: announced on 11 April for 16 to 21 April.

That was the date of the government’s press announcement, not of the schedule. The operator had the 2025 schedule on its Culebra route page by 25 March, three weeks earlier, and the PDF itself is dated 20 February. It was the same in the years before: the 2024 schedule was linked from the Vieques route page by 28 February, four weeks before it started, and the 2023 one was online by 14 March, three weeks ahead. The press announcements came one to five days before the first special sailing each year.

The holiday page now says so, and the four years are set out on Vieques and Culebra over Holy Week 2027. The advice changes with it: for Holy Week, watch the operator’s route pages from the end of February rather than waiting for the news.

Our Vieques or Culebra page called Flamenco calm and nearly waveless and recommended it for small children, as the tourism board does, with no word about the season.

Flamenco faces north. The National Weather Service in San Juan counts November to April as the winter wave season, when long-period swells from distant storms reach the coast, and it puts the exposed beaches under a high rip current risk when they arrive. In December 2025 that risk was in effect for Culebra’s beaches on 17 days, Christmas Day among them.

The page now says Flamenco is calm most of the year, and links the swell season on our holidays page. Read the Weather Service’s rip current statement the morning you go.

Vieques Air Link has added a route between Ceiba (NRR) and St. Thomas (STT). Its home page lists it as a new route, “Fridays, Sundays & Mondays”, four flights a day. At St. Thomas it checks in at the Fly The Whale counter in the main ticketing lobby of Cyril E. King Airport, closes check-in and bags 45 minutes before departure, and asks for a passport, a passport card or a Real ID.

Our flying page listed the carrier’s four Puerto Rico airports and nothing else. It now names St. Thomas as well, and our holidays page sets out how the flight puts St. Thomas or St. John on the same trip as Vieques or Culebra.

Our Vieques to Culebra page said the operator has no route page for a crossing between the islands. It has one, at its own address, linked from none of its menus: the routes index, the ticket page and the FAQ all list three routes, and this is not one of them.

That page heads the crossing “LAST SUNDAY OF THE MONTH” and says the service “operates the last Sunday of each month”. The timetable it links is effective 1 to 28 February 2023 and has no Vieques-Culebra sailing in it.

The page now says so. Its advice does not change: there is still no sailing between the islands that you can book, and the way across is back through Ceiba, a flight or a private boat.

Our Ceiba ferry page said children under 3 ride free. Neither of the operator’s own pages says that. Its rates table lists “Babies (0–3 years old)” as free, with children 4 to 12 at $1.00. Its FAQ says the free counter tickets are for “infants aged 0 to 2”. Under 3 matched neither, and left a three-year-old with no fare at all.

The page now gives both of the operator’s ranges and says to bring ID for a three-year-old, as our ferry-costs page already did.

Two of our pages called the horses on Vieques wild: Sun Bay, in its summary and its list of drawbacks, and the closing advice on the Vieques-to-Culebra page. Sun Bay’s own section on the horses says otherwise, and it is right. Most of them carry a brand and belong to island families, who work them when they are needed and turn them loose to graze. They are free-roaming, not feral. Both pages now say so, and the Sun Bay question that read “Are there really wild horses on Vieques?” now asks whether they are wild, and answers no.

Separately, two Culebra trips leave from the mainland, not from either island. The guided ferry day to Flamenco meets at the Ceiba ferry terminal, and the full-day snorkel boat leaves from Roosevelt Roads in Ceiba. Their cards named Ceiba and the mainland in words, but they were missing the mainland warning tag that every Fajardo and San Juan departure carries, because Ceiba was left off the list that decides it. Both trips now carry that tag on the Culebra day-trip and snorkeling pages.

Our card for the clear-canoe Mosquito Bay tour showed a rating of 4.5 from 309 reviews. The reviews section on its booking page reads 4.4. The star graphic at the top of that page rounds up to the nearest half star, which is where the higher figure came from.

A rating on a trip we earn from is the one number that must never read higher than it is. The card now shows 4.4.

Our flying page said that flights to Vieques and Culebra “do not leave from SJU”, that they are all public charters, that your baggage allowance is 25 pounds, and that flying is not refundable. That was Vieques Air Link’s rulebook presented as everyone’s.

Cape Air flies from Luis Muñoz Marín (SJU) to both islands, checking in at its counter in the main terminal: 25 minutes to Vieques and 20 to Culebra, with four daily flights to Culebra. It is a scheduled airline, not a public charter, and its bag rule is about size rather than weight: one personal item and one bag up to 45 linear inches ride free, and a checked bag up to 50 pounds costs $40 to Vieques or $30 to Culebra. Anyone with a suitcase who took our advice and went by ferry, or paid for a taxi across San Juan to Isla Grande, had a simpler option.

Vieques Air Link sells refundable fares too. Its regular fares are non-refundable; its refundable fares can be canceled up to an hour before departure for a refund minus a 20 percent service fee. The two different seat weights on its ticket policy, which we called a contradiction, are the two fare classes: 370 pounds on regular fares, 440 on refundable ones.

The flying page now sets the two carriers side by side, and the 25-pound rule stays where it belongs, on Vieques Air Link.

The Playa Caracas page put its map pin on the Tapon Bay trailhead lot, the start of the walking approach, and said we did not know whether you could drive to the beach itself.

You can. Enter the Vieques National Wildlife Refuge through the main eastern gate off PR-997 at kilometer 3.2 and follow the signs; Caracas is one of the first beaches inside, with parking at the sand. The page’s own directions already said so, and contradicted the line that doubted it.

The pin now marks the beach. The Tapon Trail, 0.85 miles through mangrove forest from the trailhead lot, stays on the page as the way to walk in.

Our ferry costs page said a non-resident fare rise took effect on 5 May 2026, that the new fare was not published anywhere, and that you should budget $5 round trip whatever it turned out to be. All three were wrong.

The rise was postponed. On 4 May, the day before it was due, the executive director of the Integrated Transportation Authority (ATI), Josué Menéndez Agosto, announced that Regulation 9682 would not take effect until 31 December 2026, and that ATI would amend the regulation before it does. The operator’s rates table never changed because the fare never changed: $2.00 to Vieques and $2.25 to Culebra is what a visitor pays today, plus the $2 environmental fee on the Culebra route.

The new fare is published. It is in the regulation itself, filed with the Department of State on 6 August 2025: $11.25 one way for a non-resident adult, $6.00 for a child, plus a $2.00 conservation fee on each crossing to or from either island, and new item charges including $3.00 for a suitcase. Registered residents keep today’s fares.

Why we got it wrong. The operator’s Culebra resident registry page still carries a banner announcing the new fares “Effective May 5, 2026.” We read the banner, saw the rates table had not moved, and concluded the table was stale. It was the banner.

What it would have cost you. Nothing yet. From 31 December it would have: our $5 budget would be out by a factor of five for anyone crossing after the change. The costs page now gives the budget on both sides of that date, and the three ferry pages carry a review date of 15 December, before it.

One more correction on the same page. We credited Ley Núm. 58 of 2025 with bringing Vieques into the $2 environmental fee. It was Ley Núm. 149 of 12 August 2024. Ley 58 made technical amendments that split the fund into separate accounts for each island.

Our bio bay pages said Mosquito Bay is kayak only, and told anyone in a group who cannot paddle to go to La Parguera in Lajas instead — a drive of more than two hours from San Juan, on the other side of Puerto Rico from Vieques.

Isla Nena Biobay Boat Tours runs a 40-minute electric boat on Mosquito Bay, for all ages, from a meeting point in front of the Sun Bay entrance on PR-997. The DRNA’s own management plan for the reserve names electric-motor boats, alongside kayaks and canoes, as what its concessionaires take visitors out in.

We had repeated the tourism board’s line that La Parguera is the only bay that allows motorboats. That is true of motorboats; it is not true that Mosquito Bay can only be paddled.

Two more things changed on the same pages. We said the DRNA plan was a scanned PDF with no text layer that nobody could read; it has one, and it settles the question of going without a tour — every recreational activity on the bay needs the DRNA’s authorization in advance, through its concessions. And we said there was no road to the water; tours reach it by van from Esperanza or the Sun Bay entrance.

Three of our pages repeated the tourism board’s line that “car rentals aren’t available at the ferry terminals,” and one answered “Can you rent a car at the ferry terminals?” with “No, on either island.”

On Vieques it is wrong. Coqui Car & Island Jeep Rental’s office is about 100 feet from the ferry port in Isabel Segunda: exit, turn right, walk along the water. Maritza’s Car Rental and Vieques Car Rental both pick up and drop off at the ferry dock and the airport at no charge.

We had also declined to name any rental company at all, which broke the promise our disclosure page makes: that where an island business is the right answer and no platform we work with sells it, we name it anyway. The getting-around page now names four companies on Vieques and three on Culebra, with where they are and how to reach them.

The advice underneath has not changed: rent on the island, and book before you sail.

Our where-to-stay page told readers that a 7% room tax on the bill was the signal that a booking was registered and real. Two things were wrong with that.

Hotels pay 9%. Section 24(B) of the Room Occupancy Rate Tax Act sets a general rate of nine percent. Seven percent applies to paradores, Posadas de Puerto Rico, certified bed-and-breakfasts and short-term rentals; hotels with a casino pay eleven. By our rule, a legitimate hotel charging 9% would have looked suspect.

Airbnb adds the 7% itself. Its help page says guests at every Puerto Rico listing pay the 7% room tax as part of the reservation, for stays of 89 nights or fewer, whether or not the host is registered. On the channel most visitors use, the “signal” signaled nothing.

The page now gives the full rate table and says what does tell you something: for a direct or cash booking, the host’s Tourism Company innkeeper registration. It also now names properties in each town, from their own sites, instead of declining to name any.

We said Sun Bay had no food. Puerto Rico’s tourism board lists bathrooms, showers, changing rooms, grills, food kiosks and lifeguards at the balneario. The page now prints that list beside what to count on: the restrooms are basic and sometimes closed, and the kiosks are not something to plan lunch around.

Our ferry costs page said we could not reach the law behind the Culebra environmental fee, and blamed the Municipality of Culebra’s dead website. The website is still dead. The law was never on it.

The fee is set by Commonwealth statute, not by municipal ordinance. Article 3 of Ley Num. 293 de 2004 sets

“una tarifa adicional de dos (2) dólares a cualquier visitante que ingrese a Culebra vía mar”

paid “al momento de adquirir su boleto de la lancha”, with residents and registered merchants exempt. We were looking in the wrong place, and said so on the page as though the information did not exist.

We also had the 25-cent gap wrong. The page implied the difference between the published $2.00 Vieques fare and the $2.25 Culebra fare was the environmental fee, and puzzled over why it was not $2. The word in the statute is adicional — the $2 is charged on top of the fare, not inside it. The 25-cent difference is just the fare, and the two numbers were never meant to reconcile.

And the law changed in 2025. Ley Num. 58 of 15 July 2025 renamed the fund for Culebra y Vieques and extended the same $2 charge to Vieques, with each island’s money held in a separate account. The amount did not move. The ferry operator’s published material still describes only the Culebra tax, so we cannot yet tell you whether the Vieques charge is being collected, and the page says that rather than assuming.

Corrected 23 September 2026: it was Ley Núm. 149 of 12 August 2024 that brought Vieques into the fund and renamed it. Ley 58 of 2025 split the money into separate accounts for each island. See the entry for 23 September.

What remains genuinely unpublished is the base fare a non-resident pays, so we still cannot quote you a confirmed one-way total.

Corrected 23 September 2026: the non-resident fare was published, in Regulation 9682, and its start was postponed to 31 December 2026. Until then the base fare is the $2.00 and $2.25 on the rates table. See the entry for 23 September.

When we published the Ceiba timetable on 20 September we said the second weekend sailing from Ceiba to Culebra left at 6:00 a.m. It leaves at 5:30 a.m.

That is the worst kind of error this site can make. Someone reading our page would have arrived in good time for a boat that had already gone, and the next one is at 8:00 a.m. — a two-and-a-half hour wait at the end of a drive from San Juan.

We also put a footnote marker against the weekday 9:00 a.m. Culebra sailing. There is no marker there on the document. The hazardous-material footnote is marked against the weekend 9:00 a.m. outbound and the weekend 1:00 p.m. return, and nowhere else.

Why it happened. The operator publishes these timetables only as PDFs with no text layer, so the grid has to be read positionally — times in one column, markers in another, and nothing in the file telling you which belongs to which. Our first pass was read by eye. This one was extracted with the character coordinates, so every sailing is tied to the column it actually sits in. The Vieques sheet came back identical to what we had already published; the Culebra sheet did not.

The page now carries the corrected grid, and the drawback at the top of it says what we got wrong rather than quietly showing the right number.

One other thing we noticed in the same document: the English side of the Culebra sheet says the itinerary is effective to “NOVEMBER 31, 2026.” There is no 31 November. The Spanish side of the same page says 30 November, which is the date we use.

Corrected 23 September 2026: both timetable PDFs do have a text layer, and a plain text extraction returns every sailing and footnote in column order. The first pass was read by eye, which is where the error came from; “no text layer” was not the reason.

Our ferry page told you that “turning up hoping is how people lose a day.” That was firmer than the operator’s own material supports, and it pushed people toward the wrong conclusion when the website showed nothing available.

Puerto Rico Ferry says two things that sound contradictory: “Advance purchase of tickets is not necessary” and “Advance sales are limited.” Both are true, because only a limited block of tickets is released online ahead of a sailing for non-residents and the rest is held for the ticket window on the day of departure.

The page now says so. Book online if there is inventory; if there is none, the terminal early in the day is a real option rather than a wasted drive. We also added the fares, the five-tickets-per-transaction limit, and the rule that each carry-on item on the island routes needs its own ticket.

The Flamenco Beach page said parking cost a “small fee,” which is not a number and not useful to anyone standing at a gate deciding how much cash to carry.

We went looking for the real figure and could not stand one up. The beach is a balneario run by the municipality’s own authority; the municipality publishes no tariff we can reach; the figures circulating on travel sites disagree with each other; and the most recent official account we could find described the per-person amount as a suggested donation rather than a fixed fee, which is not what almost anyone else writes.

So the page now says that there is a charge to park and a charge or requested donation per person, that no current rate is published, and that you should carry small bills in cash. We would rather publish the shape of the answer than invent the number.

Our bio bay coverage described the boats and the moon and never mentioned the one rule that matters: you cannot swim in Mosquito Bay. It is prohibited, and a guide who lets you is breaking the law — which makes it the most useful test there is of whether you have booked a legitimate operator.

Tours run only through licensed operators, so this is not a bay you can paddle into on your own.

Leave the bug spray and sunscreen off as well. Both damage the organisms that make the glow, which is the entire reason you came.

Our ferry page told you that if you had a car, taking it across was the obvious move. That advice would have cost you a day.

Puerto Rico Ferry states plainly that you may not purchase a vehicle ticket for a rental car, and requires a driver’s license and a matching vehicle registration to buy one at all. In practice vehicle passage is for residents of Vieques and Culebra.

Leave the car on the mainland and rent a jeep or a golf cart on the island — and book that ahead, because both islands run out on holiday weekends.

Two other terms worth knowing: the crossing is $2.00 to Vieques and $2.25 to Culebra, and all ticket sales are final. An unused ticket can be transferred to another departure up to twice, at least an hour before it sails.

Our Sun Bay page sent readers east for “the good beaches” and said nothing about what is out there. The eastern end of Vieques is the Vieques National Wildlife Refuge, and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service states that a major portion of it is closed to the public because of unexploded ordnance and the clean-up still under way.

The refuge’s rule for the closed areas is that they “shall not be visited by land or sea at any time.” In the areas that are open — and they are open year round, free — driving off road is prohibited, as are camping, open fires and drones.

There is now a standing note on the beaches index and on the Sun Bay page, and it ships with any refuge beach page we write later rather than arriving afterwards. Which areas are open moves with the clean-up, so check fws.gov/refuge/vieques before an east-end beach day.