The 1898 American invasion at Guánica and the end of Spanish rule

U.S. military intelligence had quietly prepared an invasion of Puerto Rico for years in advance. An operative named Edwin Emerson Jr., posing as a German journalist, obtained a hand-drawn map of the island's harbors from Rudolph Riefkohl, a fourteen-year-old from Maunabo: a detail later documented in an article in Century magazine of September 1898, and possibly used in planning the invasion's landing point.

The campaign opened at sea on May 12, 1898, when a U.S. Navy squadron under Rear Admiral William T. Sampson bombarded installations in San Juan. The Spanish captain Ángel Rivero Méndez had already fired the first shots of the conflict in Puerto Rico two days earlier, on May 10, from Fort San Cristóbal.

The ground invasion began on July 25, 1898, when Major General Nelson A. Miles landed U.S. troops, the sources give slightly different figures, roughly 1,300 for the initial landing force and up to 3,300 for the wider expeditionary convoy, unopposed, at Guánica on the island's southern coast.

The advance inland was not bloodless. U.S. forces met real resistance as they pushed forward, with fighting at Coamo, Fajardo, the Guamaní River, San Germán, and Aibonito, all with combat between American troops and Puerto Rican-Spanish defenders, before an armistice suspended all military action on August 13, 1898.

The Treaty of Paris, signed December 10, 1898, saw Spain cede Puerto Rico, along with Guam and the Philippines, to the United States, and renounce its claim over Cuba, in exchange for an American payment of twenty million dollars; the U.S. Senate ratified the treaty on February 6, 1899. The American senator Henry Cabot Lodge had written to Theodore Roosevelt on May 24, 1898: "Porto Rico is not forgotten and we mean to have it," a line that shows how deliberate the American goal was, long before the landing at Guánica. This invasion, and Spain's formal cession, closes the era this site covers.

Sources: Campaña de Puerto Rico; Historia de Puerto Rico. Freeze 2026-08-22.