Some 150 years ago, all of the Bahia Beach area in the northeast of Puerto Rico was sugar cane. With changes in global economic tides, the sugar soon gave way to a coconut plantation, and, then, to a golf course. Now this swath of coastline, bordered on two sides by natural rivers, and to the south by El Yunque rainforest and the central mountain range reaching up into the clouds, is now the St Regis Bahia Beach Resort & Golf Club. It is perhaps a familiar progression of development – and a convenient, compact history of international enterprises’ interest in PR, and of the global economy itself: from rum to tourism we go.

But what is most immediately notable about the area, just over a year after Hurricane Maria destroyed almost three quarters of the island, is just how little trace of destruction remains. Nature, as Jurassic Park has taught us, finds a way, and the rich forests and rivers here – not to mention the gazillions of herons, iguanas, frogs, song birds, manatees, and leatherback turtles who lay their eggs along the beach here – have rushed back to florid good health. According to Ms Ashley Pérez, an environmental specialist with the club, some of the destruction wrought by Maria may have been a boon – for the flora and fauna, at least – clearing away some invasive species of plants (odd, out of place fir trees, for example) to allow native and naturalized species to come in to their own.

What has grown back stronger than ever since the storm is an urgency for mainlanders to come see, and be a part of the rebuilding. Earlier this month, The New York Times named Puerto Rico its top travel destination for 2019. We wholeheartedly agree, and to prepare you for your next visit, we have a few suggestions.

Every positive travel experience begins with good food, and that is certainly true here. If you are visiting the capital of San Juan, every concierge and guidebook in their right mind will direct you to Marmalade in Old San Juan, and they are not wrong. The 14-year-old staple created and still run by chef Mr Peter Schintler is still on every one’s best lists.

Once you’ve been, head out to La Placita, the former market turned shopping-hodgepodge-eating-and-drinking-heaven. From there you can pop over to Santaella, the Rick’s Americain of San Juan, where Mr José Andres ate most nights when he was feeding an island after Hurricane Maria, where Mr Lin Manuel-Miranda and the team behind Hamilton are celebrating their opening of the show at the Centro de Bellas around the corner. The chef, Mr José Santaella, trained at Le Bernardin in New York and at elBulli in Roses, Spain, and his marriage of technique with local flavours is deservedly famous.

Around the corner, Jose Enrique has emerged as a new favourite on the island – a festive spot for locals and for bucket-listing-visitors alike. Don’t miss the Miramar Food Truck Park, a proper smorgasbord of all that we’ve come to know and love from food trucks. And the bar, La Factoría, also in Old San Juan, regularly makes lists of the best bars in the world.

Golf is not the first thing you think of in environmental preservation, which makes the course at Bahia Beach all the more notable. Once a public course, and now one of the more challenging anywhere, Bahia Beach is a certified Gold Audubon International Signature Sanctuary – a very prestigious way of saying it is exceedingly eco-friendly. According to Ms Pérez, whose mandate is to keep the entire club at the cutting edge of eco-conscientiousness, the course, designed by Mr Robert Trent Jones Jr, is just one organ in a healthy system.

To illustrate this point, he points out the efficacy of the course’s drainage. After the storm, when much of the island’s roads and low-level ground remained flooded for weeks, months, the course here drained so quickly it was dry in a matter of hours.

And as wonderful as a walk on the links, a night bar-crawling, or a day spent on Dorado Beach may be – and they are wonderful here – you can kind of do that anywhere. What makes any travel experience vital and unique is the discovery, the losing of oneself (indeed, even the getting lost).

At the edge of the Bahia Beach property to the west, at Punta San Agustin, there is a massive upturned tree and root system drifting in the triangular surf. Is this one of the fallen fir trees, still unresolved to roam any further from the island? Is it just a massive metaphor waiting for a writer to make clumsy use of it? Either way, stumbling on it one evening, as the skies all turned bubble-gum pink, felt meaningful somehow.