The Piña Colada question

The Caribe Hilton, built by the government's development agency for seven million dollars and leased to Hilton for twenty years, opened its doors on December 9, 1949. Its own official history, the one printed in its own materials, runs like this: bartender Ramón "Monchito" Marrero spent three months developing a new drink and served it for the first time on August 15, 1954. That original version was closer to a milkshake than to the cocktail known today, made of vanilla ice cream, coconut cream, and pineapple juice, and it was often served without alcohol at all, with the rum added afterward for the adult guests.

That is not the only claim on the record, however. A Spaniard named Ricardo García says he invented a piña colada at the same hotel a year earlier, in 1953. Meanwhile, the San Juan restaurant Barrachina credits its own bartender, Ramón Portas Mingot, with creating the drink separately in 1963. Three stories, three names, one small stretch of San Juan.

One thing that is not disputed is the drink's key ingredient. Coconut cream traces back to a 1954 patent filed by University of Puerto Rico professor Ramón López Irizarry, who created what became the Coco López brand, still on sale today. But even the broader idea of a pineapple-and-rum drink predates each of these "invention" stories of the 1950s. References to something similar appear in Travel magazine as early as 1922 and in National Geographic in 1924, and a 1950 New York Times piece described a "piña colada" already being served in the West Indies, before Marrero's version had even been mixed.

None of that has stopped Puerto Rico from claiming the drink officially. The island proclaimed the piña colada its official drink in 1978, and in 2004 Governor Sila María Calderón issued a proclamation marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Caribe Hilton's own account of the drink's creation. The layered, disputed history behind the celebration is, in its own way, a fair match for a drink that has always had more than one story attached.

Sources: Hotel Caribe Hilton; Piña colada. See Sources. Freeze 2026-08-22.