The fairest of crafts.

• Position: Barranquitas Artisans Fair, Puerto Rico

OVER THE YEARS, Puerto Rico has earned a solid reputation as one of the region's major craft capitals, and nowhere are its handmade creations better viewed than at the Barranquitas Artisans Fair. The island's oldest craft fair and a favorite with locals and visitors alike, the four-day event is pegged to the July 17 birthday of Puerto Rican patriot Luis Munoz Rivera, a native of this small town high in the Cordillera Central mountains. Every year the prestigious get-together draws more than 130 artisans to its shaded plaza, where live musical entertainment, workshops, and typical foods also vie for attention.

The island's early inhabitants, the Taino Indians, fashioned household items and sacred icons, known as cemis, from the area's abundant clay supplies and were equally adept at working with seeds, coconut, bone, and wood. The techniques, designs, and materials they used to weave hammocks are still popular among today's artisans, and their hollowed-out gourd guiros and maracas are identical to those used by islanders today.

The arrival of Spanish colonists in the 1500s brought innovations that were quickly adopted and adapted to local tastes. The traditional guitar found new life in small, higher pitched instruments like the tiple, requinto, and cuatro. Africans, brought to the Caribbean as slaves for island sugar plantations, introduced drums and tambourines to the emerging musical mix along with aesthetic styles that have influenced everything from Carnival masks to kitchen utensils.

Many of these early, made-by-hand objects were all but forgotten during the decades-long push towards industrialization that followed the U.S. takeover early in the last century. But a sustained effort by the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture has helped conserve and promote endangered traditions and raise public awareness.

In 1961, as part of that promotion, the institute sponsored Puerto...