Puerto Rico keeps Christmas for a long time. It is under way by Thanksgiving, peaks between Christmas Eve and Three Kings Day on 6 January, and ends with the Fiestas de la Calle San Sebastián in Old San Juan, which in 2027 run from 21 to 24 January. Over those weeks the Ceiba ferry carries islanders home and San Juan families out for the long weekends, and Vieques and Culebra fill with Puerto Ricans as much as with visitors.
Three things decide a holiday trip here: the boat, the bed and the moon. All three run short in the same weeks.
The dates that matter
| Date | What it means for the islands |
|---|---|
| Thu 26 Nov | Thanksgiving, a public holiday. The season is on |
| Early December | Each island lights its town plaza. The dates come out in November |
| Tue 8 Dec | New moon |
| 22–24 Dec | No bio bay tours: full moon on the 23rd |
| Fri 25 Dec | Christmas Day, a public holiday, and a three-day weekend |
| Thu 31 Dec | The non-resident ferry fare is due to change |
| Fri 1 Jan | New Year’s Day, a public holiday, and a three-day weekend |
| Wed 6 Jan | Three Kings Day (Día de Reyes), a public holiday |
| Thu 7 Jan | New moon |
| Mon 18 Jan | Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a public holiday, and a three-day weekend |
| 21–23 Jan | No bio bay tours: full moon on the 22nd |
| 21–24 Jan | Fiestas de la Calle San Sebastián, Old San Juan |
The federal holidays are on the Office of Personnel Management’s 2026 and 2027 calendars, and Puerto Rico observes them. Three Kings Day has been a Puerto Rico holiday by law since 1931. Eugenio María de Hostos’s birthday on 11 January no longer closes anything: Ley 111 of 2014 folded it into the Día de las Mujeres y Hombres Próceres in February, and 11 January is now a commemorative day only. Some holiday lists online still show it.
The governor can add a day or two. Puerto Rico’s Political Code counts any day the governor fixes as a holiday, and for last season executive order OE-2025-058, signed in December, gave executive-branch employees Friday 2 January and Monday 5 January 2026 off, charged to vacation leave. Any order for this season would come the same way, in December. Where it sits beside a weekend, the boats fill the way they do on any long weekend.
San Sebastián is set. The Municipality of San Juan’s ordinance, approved on 1 July 2026, puts the festival at Thursday 21 to Sunday 24 January 2027. Its first three nights are the bio bay’s closure for the January full moon, so a trip built around the festival and Mosquito Bay belongs in the dark nights either side of it.
The ferry over the holidays
The December timetable is not out yet
Puerto Rico Ferry’s published itineraries for both islands run from 1 August to 30 November 2026, and both are still the ones its route pages link. Its FAQ is plain about what that means:
“Advance sales are limited. Agents can only sell tickets for schedules that have been published on Puertoricoferry.com and the APP.”
So December’s seats go on sale with the next timetable. The current one is stamped “LAST UPDATE: June 3, 2026”, two months ahead of its first sailing. The sailing times themselves are set by the Government of Puerto Rico, not the operator. Every sailing to 30 November is on our ferry schedule, with the operator’s PDFs linked above each grid.
Plan on the ordinary timetable, not on extra boats. No holiday schedule has been announced for Christmas. The special schedules the Integrated Transportation Authority (ATI) has run in recent years were for Holy Week. They went up on the operator’s site three to four weeks ahead, and ATI announced them days before: in 2025 the schedule for 16 to 21 April was online by 25 March, and ATI’s announcement came on 11 April. Holy Week 2027 has the last four years side by side.
Who gets a seat
The operator boards in a fixed order:
“Priority order for passenger boarding: a. Pregnant women, senior citizens (60 years of age or older); persons with disabilities and veterans. b. Bona fide residents of the municipality’s islands. c. Passengers with tickets purchased at www.puertoricoferry.com d. Passengers with tickets purchased at the terminal counter.”
Residents can buy ahead online or at the ticket window. A visitor buys ahead only online, from “a limited number of tickets” held back for advance sale, and “additional tickets are reserved and released for purchase on the day of scheduled departure.” The operator gives no split between the two. JAK Water Sports, a bio bay operator in Esperanza, tells its guests that about 20 percent of tickets sell online, that visitors “have been bumped to later ferry departure times” in the peak season from December to April, and to be at the window two hours ahead. The operator’s own rule is to arrive an hour before the sailing and to buy a ticket for the next boat at least 15 minutes before it leaves.
What that means over the holidays:
- Buy both directions the day December sailings go on sale. The return is the ticket that runs out. The operator’s FAQ has a question for exactly that case, and the answer is the window on the day, if there is capacity.
- Avoid the edges of the long weekends. Christmas Day and New Year’s Day are Fridays, so 25 to 27 December and 1 to 3 January are three-day weekends, and so is 16 to 18 January. Travel midweek if you can.
- An empty website does not mean a full boat. More seats are released at the window on the day of the sailing, as capacity allows, so go to the window early on the day, and earlier than the operator’s hour on a holiday weekend.
- Use the transfer rule. Sales are final, but a ticket can be moved to another departure twice, at least an hour before it sails. A seat on a day near the one you want is worth holding.
- Five tickets per transaction. A family of six buys twice.
The Ceiba ferry page has the rest of the rules, and where to stay before the Ceiba ferry has the beds near the terminal for the first boats of the day, which on a holiday weekend are the ones worth being on.
The fare, and 31 December
On 11 October 2026 the operator’s rates table still showed $2.00 to Vieques and $2.25 to Culebra for an adult, plus the $2 Culebra fee for non-residents. Those fares hold until 31 December 2026, the date ATI postponed Regulation 9682 to. As filed, a non-resident adult then pays $11.25 plus a $2 conservation fee each way, to either island, and $3 for a suitcase beyond the free carry-on. ATI has said it will amend the regulation before it takes effect.
A trip out on 28 December and back on 2 January crosses that date: budget the old fare out and the new one back, and check the week before you sail. What the ferry costs has both columns.
Flying instead
When the boats are full, the planes are the other way across. Cape Air flies from SJU itself, 25 minutes to Vieques and 20 to Culebra. Vieques Air Link flies from Isla Grande in San Juan and from Ceiba, with 25 pounds of baggage in total. Both fly small planes, and on a holiday weekend a handful of seats goes quickly, so book the flight when you book the bed. The flying page has the fares and the baggage rules, which decide more than the fare does.
From St. Thomas, or on to St. John
The Spanish Virgin Islands and the US Virgin Islands are close enough to share a holiday trip, and Ceiba, the ferry’s own town, now has a direct flight to St. Thomas. Vieques Air Link flies Ceiba to St. Thomas on “Fridays, Sundays & Mondays”, four flights a day, and flies on from Ceiba to both islands. At St. Thomas it checks in at the Fly The Whale counter in the main ticketing lobby of Cyril E. King Airport, and check-in and bags close 45 minutes before departure. It asks for a passport, a passport card or a Real ID, verifies documents before check-in closes, and does not transfer bags to other airlines.
Cape Air flies St. Thomas to San Juan, and San Juan to Vieques and Culebra. Its route map draws no line from St. Thomas to either island, so on Cape Air the trip runs through San Juan. No scheduled ferry crosses between Culebra or Vieques and St. Thomas.
If St. John is the other half of the trip, the taxi and the ferry from St. Thomas airport are on our St. John guide: St. Thomas airport to St. John. St. John’s own holiday weeks book out too, jeeps first, and St. John at Christmas and New Year’s has what goes first and when.
The bio bay and the moon, December to March
Every tour on Mosquito Bay stops for the full moon. Abe’s Snorkeling & Biobay puts the rule plainly:
“All biobay tour companies in Vieques are closed during the night before the full moon, the night of the full moon, and the night after the full moon every month per DRNA regulation.”
JAK Water Sports says the same of the DNER’s rules, and Alikei Adventures lists the same three closed days. Alikei’s advice on the rest of the month matches the arithmetic below: book the ten days around the new moon, or “the week after the full moon on the early tour times”, when the moon rises after the first tour is off the water. Alikei also lists itself as closed on “some major holidays”, so check that Christmas Day or New Year’s Day is on sale on its listing before you build the night around one.
What the moon does during the tours, night by night. The tours run from around sunset into the late evening, so the table counts the moon over 6:30 to 10 PM, Atlantic Standard Time, which Vieques keeps all year:
| Evenings | The moon from 6:30 to 10 PM |
|---|---|
| 26–27 Nov | Dark until moonrise at 7:58 and 9:06 PM |
| 28 Nov – 9 Dec | Out of the sky all evening. New moon 8 Dec |
| 10–13 Dec | A thin crescent, 2 to 18 percent lit, setting from 7:09 to 9:45 PM |
| 14–21 Dec | Up all evening |
| 22–24 Dec | No tours. Full moon 23 Dec, 9:28 PM |
| 25–27 Dec | Dark until moonrise at 7:52, 8:58 and 9:59 PM |
| 28 Dec – 7 Jan | Out of the sky all evening. New moon 7 Jan |
| 8–11 Jan | A thin crescent, 1 to 13 percent lit, setting from 6:50 to 9:21 PM |
| 12–20 Jan | Up all evening |
| 21–23 Jan | No tours. Full moon 22 Jan, 8:17 AM |
| 24–25 Jan | Dark until moonrise at 8:40 and 9:37 PM |
| 26 Jan – 6 Feb | Out of the sky all evening. New moon 6 Feb |
| 7–10 Feb | A thin crescent, 1 to 15 percent lit, setting from 7:18 to 9:47 PM |
| 11–18 Feb | Up all evening |
| 19–21 Feb | No tours. Full moon 20 Feb, 7:23 PM |
| 22–23 Feb | Dark until moonrise at 8:17 and 9:13 PM |
| 24 Feb – 7 Mar | Out of the sky all evening. New moon 8 Mar |
| 8–11 Mar | A thin crescent, 0 to 11 percent lit, setting from 6:52 to 9:32 PM |
| 12–20 Mar | Up all evening |
| 21–23 Mar | No tours. Full moon 22 Mar, 6:44 AM |
| 24–25 Mar | Dark until moonrise at 8:50 and 9:47 PM |
| 26 Mar – 6 Apr | Out of the sky all evening. New moon 6 Apr |
The phases, moonrises and moonsets are the US Naval Observatory’s, computed for Mosquito Bay at 18.10° N, 65.44° W, and its phase times agree with timeanddate.com’s San Juan calendar to within a minute. The closed nights are the night before, the night of and the night after each full moon by the local date. That matters in December: the full moon at 9:28 PM on the 23rd is 01:28 on the 24th in Universal Time, and a calendar set to UTC moves the closure onto Christmas night. Every night of 2027, from the same figures, is on the Mosquito Bay moon calendar for 2027, and a trip after the holidays, in the high season from February, has its own page: Vieques and Culebra in February, March and April 2027, with the ferry and the swell season for those months.
How to read it for a holiday trip:
- 28 December to 7 January is the stretch to aim for. The moon is below the horizon for the whole evening, and it takes in New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day and Three Kings Day. It is also when the islands are fullest, so book the tour when you book the bed.
- Christmas night works on the first tour. The moon rises at 7:52 PM, and each night after it rises about an hour later.
- Mid-December is the worst week for it. From 14 to 21 December the moon is up through the evening, then the bay closes for three nights.
- San Sebastián’s first three nights are a closure. 21 to 23 January are closed, and 12 to 20 January the moon is up all evening.
The moon table on the Mosquito Bay page gives the nine nights centered on each new moon, when the moon is thinnest. Counted by the hours the boats are on the water, the dark run is longer on the far side of the full moon, which is what puts New Year’s week inside it. A clear night still matters as much as a dark one.
Which boat. The electric boat is the one for anyone who cannot or would rather not paddle; the clear canoes, run for all ages and experience levels, are the one for children and first-time paddlers. All three trips on this page leave from Vieques itself. If you are sleeping in San Juan, Mosquito Bay from San Juan in a day works on the first tour and the last ferry. Over the holidays, JAK’s warning about visitors bumped to later boats is the reason to cross in the morning, not on the afternoon boat the plan allows.
Flamenco and the winter swells
The National Weather Service in San Juan divides the sea around Puerto Rico into two wave seasons, and the winter one runs from November to April, when long-period swells from distant storms reach the coast. Flamenco faces north.
When the swells come in, the San Juan office puts the exposed beaches under a high rip current risk, and in December 2025 its warnings covered Culebra’s beaches on 17 days. On Christmas Day 2025 the warning named the north-facing beaches of Culebra, St. Thomas and St. John, and the north-facing beaches of Vieques with St. Croix. In the Weather Service’s words, rip currents “can sweep even the best swimmers away from shore into deeper water.”
Read the rip current statement on the National Weather Service San Juan page the morning you go, and on a high-risk day keep to the sand. On Vieques, the beaches on this site, Sun Bay, Playa Caracas and La Chiva, are on the south coast, away from the north-facing beaches the warnings name.
Christmas on the islands
Each island switches on its Christmas lights in the town plaza in early December, and announces the night in November. Vieques announced its 2023 lighting on 27 November, for Saturday 2 December at 5 PM in the Plaza Pública Luis Muñoz Rivera in Isabel Segunda. Culebra’s 2025 lighting was Friday 5 December at 7 PM in its Plaza Pública. The 2026 nights come out the same way, in November.
Book in this order
Our usual advice is the ferry first, but December’s ferry seats go on sale with a timetable that is not out yet. For the holidays:
- The bed, Culebra first, because it has the fewest. Where to stay sorts the towns. Puerto Rico’s room tax is 9 percent at hotels and 7 percent at guesthouses and rentals, and a headline rate can leave it out.
- The bio bay night, inside a dark stretch above.
- The crossing: the ferry the day December sailings go on sale, both directions, or a flight now.
- The jeep or golf cart. The fleets are small, and a holiday weekend empties them: who rents what, and where.
If the choice of island is still open, Vieques or Culebra sets them side by side. There is no ferry between them.
