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Puerto Rico
The most populous U.S. territory, a Caribbean commonwealth
Puerto Rico is by far the most populous U.S. territory, a Caribbean archipelago about a thousand miles southeast of Florida whose main island runs roughly 100 miles east to west. A Spanish colony for four centuries until the United States acquired it in 1898, it is an unincorporated territory with the status of a commonwealth. Its people are U.S. citizens by birth, yet they cannot vote for president and send only a non-voting resident commissioner to Congress.
A mountainous spine, the Cordillera Central, runs the length of the island, ringed by a densely populated coastal lowland and the metropolitan sprawl of San Juan - the capital and the oldest city under the U.S. flag. Spanish is the dominant language and the culture is distinctly Latin American and Caribbean. Hurricane Maria in 2017, a long government debt crisis, and steady migration to the mainland have reshaped the island, whose population has fallen below 3.2 million.