Crusader of Puerto Rican culture.

• Position: !Ojo!

MOST VACATIONERS to the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico would consider their trip incomplete without a visit to historic Old San Juan for a stroll along its cobblestone streets where pastel-colored colonial homes, museums, galleries and leafy plazas vie for attention.

What these visitors might not realize, however, is that the unique, wailed enclave and indeed much of this island's priceless cultural heritage would no longer exist were it not for the tireless crusading of one man, eighty-three-year-old Dr. Ricardo Alegria. For more than sixty years, this historian, anthropologist, teacher, and archaeologist has dedicated his life to rescuing, nurturing, and promoting Puerto Rican culture throughout his native land and around the world.

Old San Juan is arguably the greatest monument to Alegria's decades of work and the one that has brought him local and international acclaim. "For the most part," I am pleased with the way in which the city has developed, although I can't believe the prices that houses are selling for these days," he says, looking out onto Sol Street from his book-lined office in the Center for Advanced Studies of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, a graduate school he founded in 1977.

This busy seven-square-block city, boasting two military forts, gothic and neoclassic churches and incomparable views of San Juan Bay and the Atlantic, was for more than four hundred years, the island's political, commercial, and cultural epicenter. Only in the 1930s did the Old District fall on hard times and its first families, including Alegria's, desert their colonial homes in favor of the suburbs.

Then in the mid-1950s, to demonstrate that Old San Juan could make a comeback, Alegria bought and refurbished an eighteenth-century residence in the heart of town and slowly, others followed his lead. The movement picked up more steam with the establishment of the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture. With Alegria at its head, the organization backed legislation offering property owners generous tax breaks to restore their colonial buildings in accordance with specific guidelines.

Today, nearly five decades after his pioneering efforts, the...