The Taino of Boriken venerated the cemis, carved seats of ancestral and natural power, in ceremonies of song, dance and the cohoba trance, and their chiefs' plazas and petroglyphs still mark the island. Spain made the island one of Catholic America's oldest grounds: the diocese of San Juan was erected in 1511, among the first in the New World, and four centuries of Spanish rule built the cathedrals, the town patron feasts and the santos de palo, the carved wooden saints of household devotion that became the island's signature folk art.
The change of empire in 1898 brought the First Amendment and an organised Protestant arrival, the denominations formally dividing the island into comity zones, Presbyterians west, Baptists centre, Methodists east, a map whose traces persist. The twentieth century belonged to two movements: Pentecostalism, which grew from returned migrants and island revivals into the largest Protestant force, and espiritismo, the Kardecist spiritism that took root among the nineteenth century intelligentsia and blended at the popular level with Catholic and African inheritances into the Mesa Blanca tradition. Puerto Rican religion now moves with its diaspora, botanicas and parishes alike serving families that span San Juan and New York, and the January festival of the Three Kings, with its carved riders on horseback, remains the island's tenderest feast.