The Range and the Reclaiming: How Flamenco Stopped Being a Target

Flamenco Beach is one of the best-ranked beaches in the world, and for more than thirty years it was a place the United States military fired live rounds. Both facts are part of the same history, because the reason Flamenco was never paved into a resort strip is that it was a bombing range first and a federal wildlife refuge alongside it, and the people of Culebra had to go to jail to get the beach back.

A Naval Reservation and a Bird Refuge, From the Same President

The military history of Culebra begins with Theodore Roosevelt. In 1903 he established the Culebra Naval Reservation, placing the small island 27 kilometers east of mainland Puerto Rico under US Navy control. Six years later, in 1909, the same president set aside part of the same island as a federal bird refuge, the origin of today's Culebra National Wildlife Refuge and one of the oldest such preserves in the United States.

That double act is the contradiction Culebra has lived inside ever since. One island was made, by one administration, into both a place to practice war and a place to protect nesting birds. The refuge would outlast the bombing; the bombing would nearly destroy the thing the refuge existed to protect.

Thirty-Six Years as a Range

In 1939 the Navy began using the Culebra archipelago as a gunnery and bombing practice site, preparing for the Second World War. Flamenco Beach sat inside the impact area. Through the war and into the Cold War the range intensified, and US naval exercises on Culebra reached their peak in 1969, with many ships and air units of the Atlantic Fleet attached to it.

What this meant on the ground at Flamenco was ordnance. The Marines used the beach for live-fire training, with armored vehicles parked on the sand as stationary targets. For the residents of Culebra, an island that has never had more than a couple thousand people, the bombing was a daily fact of life on their own coastline, conducted by a military whose presence they had never been asked to approve.

The Tanks

The most visible inheritance of the range is still on the beach. At the western end of Flamenco, two M4 Sherman tanks sit half-collapsed at the tree line, abandoned where they served as live-fire targets when the Navy departed in 1975. The salt air has corroded them for half a century. Locals and visitors keep them visually alive by painting them, layer over layer of graffiti repainted as the old coats flake away.

They are, by now, the most photographed objects on the island, and Culebra has chosen to keep them. They were not overlooked by a cleanup crew; they remain because the island decided a rusting tank covered in spray paint is a more honest monument to what happened here than an empty stretch of sand would be.

1971: The Chapel Inside the Range

The Navy did not leave on its own. In 1971 the people of Culebra began organized protests against the bombing, joined by the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP) under its president, Rubén Berríos, and by ecumenical clergy committees, Catholic and Protestant, formed to support them. The strategy was civil disobedience.

Its sharpest expression was a building. The protesters constructed a small ecumenical chapel directly on Flamenco Beach, inside the live bombing range, after the military had demolished an earlier structure. Putting a chapel and the people praying in it inside the impact area meant the Navy could not fire without firing on civilians, and the exercises stopped.

The response was arrest. Berríos and thirteen others were charged with trespassing on US military property and sentenced to three months in a Puerto Rican prison. Berríos, a well-regarded attorney, was expelled from his professorship at the University of Puerto Rico School of Law as a consequence of the imprisonment. The protests continued for roughly four years.

1975: The Navy Leaves, and Moves to Vieques

In 1975 the Navy ceased using Culebra as a gunnery range and moved its operations to the neighboring island of Vieques. It is important to keep the two islands straight: Culebra's fight ended in 1975; Vieques's was only beginning, and the bombing there continued until 2003, when a parallel and larger civil-disobedience movement finally forced the Navy out. Culebra was the first round. The chapel on Flamenco Beach was where Puerto Rico first proved the Navy could be moved.

What the Range Left Behind

The reclaiming is not complete. Large portions of Culebra remain a Formerly Used Defense Site, and the US Army Corps of Engineers has spent decades searching for and removing unexploded ordnance left from the range years. The main Flamenco strand has been cleared and is safe to use; the peninsula, the backcountry, and the old impact zones beyond the beach are posted and restricted, and live shells still turn up. The decision to fire on this coastline for thirty-six years created a contamination problem the federal government has never fully resolved.

What survived intact is the thing the bombing might have been expected to ruin. The refuge Roosevelt created in 1909 still protects roughly fifty thousand seabirds nesting on the Flamenco Peninsula each summer and the leatherback, green, and hawksbill turtles that come ashore along the refuge beaches. The beach kept its sand and its turquoise water, undeveloped precisely because no one was allowed to build on a range. When the world's best-beach rankings arrived decades later, they were ranking a coastline that had been preserved, by accident and by struggle, in the only way a Caribbean beach this beautiful ever survives the resort era: by being a place you were not permitted to go.

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