SAN JUAN • Feels like home to Miranda

of the theater community on the island when you’re there,” he said.

Cerro Gordo Beach

“This is where all my childhood summer pictures are,” said Miranda of the generous stretch of sand in Vega Alta about half an hour from the center of San Juan. He would spend most of his time at his grandparents’ house while they worked, but occasionally in summer, “we’d go to the beach — and it’s beautiful. It’s my childhood beach.”

The ocean lapping at these shores is especially gentle. “The waves are so chill, you can let the kids and the dog run around, and it’s so easy to get into and out of the water in Puerto Rico. I just see that coastline, and it’s home.”

Café Manolín

“Café Manolín is the best example of great Puerto Rican food,” Miranda said of the upscale diner in Old San Juan that he counts as a recent discovery — “it’s already my new old hang,” he said. “You’re going to get plantains in some form, whether you want them sweet as maduros or salted and fried. You’re going to get a rice — could be white rice, it could be brown rice. And you’re going to get beans — you could get red beans, you could get black beans, you could get lentils.

“Those are the food groups in my experience in Puerto Rico: rice, beans, plantains, meat,” he said. “For me: white rice with red beans and maduros — I like plantains sweet — and chicken or steak chicharrones.”

The Puerto Rico Museum of Art

For years, Miranda has been active in raising money for the arts and arts organizations in Puerto Rico, and “one of the things we discovered was that there’s a treasuretrove of Puerto Rican art from the 17th century onward that was just sitting in vaults,” he says. “Not a lot of it is being displayed.”

The Puerto Rico Museum of Art, in the Santurce neighborhood, opened in 2000, although the new permanent collection didn’t open until 2019. “They have an exhibit from the 17th century to current masters, and you really see a through line,” Miranda said. “It’s wild to see techniques that were celebrated all over the world and how they manifested in Puerto Rico, with a local Puerto Rican flavor — even in a portrait of a governor from the 17th century.”