The Dutch burn San Juan, 1625

On September 25, 1625, a Dutch fleet under Boudewijn Hendricksz came against San Juan. The Netherlands were at war with Spain over independence, and the war had a Caribbean wing. Hendricksz did not repeat Drake's mistake of exchanging broadsides in the channel. He landed men, seized the town, and sat down to starve out Castillo San Felipe del Morro. The mouth of the harbor still had Spanish cannons. The streets behind it did not.

The National Park Service account is short and hard. After twenty-one days of siege the Dutch could not force a surrender. Supplies and ammunition ran out. The land-front hornwork, rebuilt after the 1598 English success by land, did its job. El Morro remained a Spanish island inside a captured town. That is a strange victory. The castle held; the town was a prize that could not be kept.

Before re-embarking, the Dutch burned San Juan. Houses, warehouses, and churches went. The NPS phrase is the one to keep: they abandoned the islet, but not before burning the city to ashes. A reader who only photographs the fort from the lawn misses the point of 1625. The masonry survived. The civilian city paid.

Spain answered with more wall. The English attack of 1598 and the Dutch fire of 1625 are the two blows that pushed the crown to lengthen the city curtains and raise a land fort on the hill later called San Cristóbal. A harbor castle that cannot protect its own streets is only half a system. The year 1625 is the reason the eastern works exist.

Hendricksz leaves the story as a man who won a city and lost a war in the same month. For San Juan the smoke is the fact. The castle one walks is famous for not falling. The town one walks was rebuilt over a layer of burning. Redoubt keeps both halves on the board: the hornwork that held, and the houses that did not.

Sources: NPS El Morro. Freeze 2026-08-22.