El Yunque

A tropical rainforest is a phenomenal, rare, and rather humbling experience–a real space speaking of geography (and climate), autobiography, and metaphoric (to quote Robert Adams).


A book of photographs also creates a very idiosyncratic world where juxtapositions and associations can generate esthetic, emotional, and, once again, metaphorical content.





El Yunque is the second highest mountain in El Yunque National Forest, located North East of the island of Puerto Rico. It is 3,494-ft high. Given its 200 inches of annual rain, the massif is covered by a luxuriant tropical rainforest. Such a vegetation constitutes an amazing universe where one is reduced to the role of Gulliver lost among giant ferns in an ocean of green.





These images where taken along the valley of the Cubuy river, a mountain creek that flows down El Yunque’s south-eastern side. The National Rainforest itself covers part of the Luquillo range, 30 miles south-east of San Juan, Puerto Rico’s capital. A road, Carretera 191, used to cross El Yunque following a North-South axis. Hurricanes and the landslides that followed them have become the agents of a reconquering nature. Carretera 191 sometimes completely disappears. Human attempts to control the rainforest have failed.