San Juan de Ulúa and Romancing the Stone

January 28, 2020

The main reason for choosing Veracruz as my destination with Dad was because one of his favorite movies, Romancing the Stone, had scenes filmed there. The movie is set in Colombia, and the final scene is in a fort in Cartagena. When I was in Cartagena, Dad told me I should go see it, and a quick Google search told me I wasn't actually in the right country. So it went on my bucket list, and is finally getting checked off.

San Juan de Ulúa was the last Spanish stronghold in Mexico, and it has all sorts of history that we didn't really care about, since we just wanted to find where the scenes were filmed. I printed some movie screenshots for comparison. So without further ado:

Of course we had to recreate Danny DeVito.

In addition to comparing movie stills to real life, we enjoyed walking around the rest of the fort. There's a lot more than is shown in the movie, built all out of coral blocks taken from the surrounding reefs.

Since it's mostly original construction from over 200 years ago, many of the rooms had stalactites dripping from the ceiling, a result of water seepage through the limestone coral.

We spent about 2 hours poking around all the places in the fort, and heres some photos.

I highly recommend visiting the fort if you're ever in Veracruz. I also recommend watching Romancing the Stone, because its great.

After some lunch we hopped on a bus towards higher elevations and cooler temperatures. Our next couple days will be spent exploring the areas around Coatepec!