La Décima and Trova Jíbara: Puerto Rico’s Living Art of Improvised Poetry

TL;DR: The décima is a ten-line rhymed poetic form, sung to the cuatro, that Puerto Rican trovadores improvise on the spot. Brought from Spain and refined over four centuries, it is the heart of jíbaro mountain music and a living tradition still performed at festival trovador competitions across the island. This guide covers what the décima is, its history, its structure, its cultural significance, and where you can hear it improvised today.

There is a moment at a Puerto Rican festival that stops visitors in their tracks. A trovador steps up with a cuatro player beside him, someone in the crowd shouts out a theme, and within seconds the singer weaves it into a perfect ten-line stanza that rhymes, scans, and lands a punchline, all invented on the spot. This is the décima, and watching it done well is like watching a jazz solo built entirely out of poetry.

The décima is not a relic. It is one of the most sophisticated living folk traditions in the Americas, a four-hundred-year-old poetic form that Puerto Ricans still improvise, compete in, and pass to their children. This guide is a full introduction to the art, its history, and where to experience it. For the broader tradition it belongs to, see our guide to seis and jíbaro music and our overview of the music of Puerto Rico.

What is the décima?

The décima is a poetic form: a stanza of ten octosyllabic lines (ten lines of eight syllables each) with a fixed consonant rhyme scheme. In Puerto Rico it is the poetry of the jíbaro, the mountain farmer, and it is almost always sung rather than merely recited, accompanied by the cuatro and the rest of the traditional string ensemble.

Two related words matter here. The trova is the broader practice of this sung folk poetry, and the trovador is the singer-poet who performs it. When people speak of “la trova jíbara,” they mean this whole art of sung, often improvised décima poetry rooted in the Puerto Rican countryside.

What separates the décima from ordinary song lyrics is improvisation. There is a vast repertoire of written décimas, but the tradition’s beating heart is the trovador who composes verses in real time, and that skill is what draws crowds at festivals across the island.

Where the décima comes from

The form has a precise origin, which is unusual for folk traditions. The décima as we know it was created by the Spanish poet and musician Vicente Espinel (1550-1624) of Ronda, in Andalusia, who published it in his 1591 book Diversas rimas. In his honor the ten-line form is still called the espinela. The great playwright Lope de Vega adopted and popularized it, which helped carry the form across the Spanish empire and into the Americas.

In Puerto Rico, the décima took root and became something distinctly local. Discover Puerto Rico traces more than two hundred years of history for the décima and trova on the island, noting that once the form reached Latin America it took on a life of its own. It arrived through Spanish settlement and, by several accounts, through migration from the Canary Islands, whose own décima tradition remains a sister to Puerto Rico’s to this day.

By the 19th century the form was everywhere in Puerto Rican life, both in high literature and in the mountains. The first major literary use came with Manuel Alonso’s landmark 1849 book El Gíbaro, the foundational portrait of jíbaro culture, and across the century poets like José Gautier Benítez, Lola Rodríguez de Tío, and Francisco “Pachín” Marín worked in the form. At the same time, in the countryside, ordinary farmers improvised décimas with what one 1883 observer called “astonishing ease,” following Espinel’s difficult metric scheme from memory.

The structure of the décima

The technical craft is what makes the improvisation so astonishing, so it is worth understanding.

A single décima is ten octosyllabic lines rhyming ABBAACCDDC. The Smithsonian Folkways teaching materials on jíbaro music lay out the scheme clearly: the first line rhymes with the fourth and fifth, the second with the third, the sixth with the seventh and tenth, and the eighth with the ninth. That interlocking pattern is demanding enough to write on paper; to improvise it, in meter, while singing and landing a coherent argument, is a genuine feat.

The full sung form is usually longer than a single stanza. A performed trova commonly runs to forty-four lines: an opening four-line stanza (a copla or planta) that states the theme, followed by four ten-line décimas that develop it. Competition rules typically require true consonant rhyme, the stricter kind, where the endings match exactly.

Then there is the pie forzado, the “forced foot,” a line or theme handed to the trovador, often by the audience, that the singer must build toward and end each décima on. Imagine being given a random closing line and having to improvise ten metrically perfect rhyming lines that arrive naturally at it, then do it three more times. That is a normal day for a working Puerto Rican trovador.

The controversia: poetry as a duel

The most electrifying form of the trova is the controversia, also called the pico a pico. Two trovadores face off in a poetic duel, trading improvised décimas, each responding to the other’s argument, teasing, and topping it, all in strict meter and rhyme and all in real time. The crowd is the judge, and the wit can be ferocious and hilarious.

This is where the tradition’s competitive spirit and its humor come together, and it is the single most impressive thing you can witness in jíbaro music. A great controversia is spontaneous stand-up comedy, debate, and formal poetry fused into one, and it lands even if your Spanish is imperfect, because the crowd’s reaction tells you when someone has delivered a devastating verse.

The instruments and the lelolai

The décima does not travel alone. It is carried by the conjunto jíbaro, the traditional string ensemble. Today that typically means the cuatro, the ten-stringed (five double-course) national instrument of Puerto Rico, joined by the Spanish guitar, the güiro (the scraped gourd of Taíno origin), and the bongó. Some groups expand it with a second cuatro, congas, accordion, or flute. Historically the ensemble used two now-rare native instruments, the tiple and the bordonúa, which have largely fallen out of use.

There is one more signature element: the lelolai. This is a wordless vocable, a sung refrain of syllables like “le-lo-lai,” that trovadores use between verses, and it is one of the most recognizable and uniquely Puerto Rican markers of the whole tradition. To hear a crowd answer a trovador’s lelolai is to hear the sound of the Puerto Rican countryside itself.

Why the décima matters to Puerto Ricans

The décima is more than entertainment. For centuries it was the voice of the rural population, and it carried whatever the jíbaro needed it to carry: love, faith, humor, hardship, and political commentary. The poet Luis Llorens Torres captured this in his prose poem “La Copla Jíbara,” calling the décima “our couplet, the old four-hundred-year-old couplet” and describing it as flying “on the wings of the rustic cuatro,” a voice rising from the mountains themselves.

That connection to identity is why the form carries such weight. The jíbaro became the national symbol of Puerto Rican resilience, and the décima is the jíbaro’s own art form, the way the countryside spoke, argued, courted, and remembered. When a trovador sings today, that whole lineage stands behind the performance. It is also part of a wider Ibero-American family: the same Espinel décima is improvised by Cuban repentistas, Canary Island verseadores, and Argentine payadores, and Puerto Rican trovadores now represent the island at international gatherings.

The lelolai goes to the Super Bowl: Ricky Martin and Bad Bunny

In February 2026, an estimated audience of over a hundred million people heard the lelolai at the Super Bowl LX halftime show. During Bad Bunny’s performance, fellow Puerto Rican Ricky Martin appeared and sang a verse of Bad Bunny’s “Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii,” seated on a white plastic chair before a plantain tree, an image lifted from the Debí Tirar Más Fotos album cover, with dancers in jíbaro pavas around him.

The song is a warning against gentrification and the erosion of Puerto Rican identity, using Hawaii as a cautionary tale, and its refrain plants the lelolai at the center of that defiance: don’t let go of the flag, the verse insists, and don’t forget the “lelolai.” That a global pop star sang that wordless jíbaro syllable, the same one a trovador cries between décimas in a mountain town like Yauco, on the biggest stage in American television is a measure of how deep the trova runs in the Puerto Rican sense of self. The lelolai is shorthand for the whole tradition, and here it stood in for the culture worth protecting.

It was not the first time Ricky Martin carried the lelolai to a mass audience. His 2006 song “Pégate,” a plena-driven anthem built on Puerto Rican drums, opens with the line “Lelolai, ay le lo le lo” and turns the folk vocable into a pop hook. From the jíbaro’s cuatro to the Super Bowl, the lelolai keeps doing the same job it always has: announcing, unmistakably, that this is Puerto Rico.

The décima is a living tradition

Here is the part that surprises people: the décima is not merely preserved, it is thriving. Far from fading into a museum piece, it has a vigorous contemporary life.

Much of that vitality is organized. The nonprofit Decimania Inc., founded in 2007 by trovadores Omar Santiago Fuentes and Roberto Silva Gómez, has spent years creating spaces for décima performers, publishing collections of contemporary décimas, and raising funds to send Puerto Rican trovadores to international improvisation gatherings. Their published anthologies are full of brand-new décimas by living authors, with titles that celebrate the form itself, the cuatro, the coquí, and Puerto Rico’s towns. As Silva Gómez put it, Puerto Rico has a tradition admired around the world that Puerto Ricans themselves are still learning to appreciate.

The form also reaches huge audiences through popular culture. Trovadores appear in the beloved Banco Popular Christmas music specials, and a new generation, including young performers billed as “niño trovador” prodigies, keeps the art visibly alive as children learn to improvise décimas in schools and cultural programs.

Where to experience the décima today

This is heritage music with real venues, if you know when and where to look.

Festival trovador competitions are the best way to see the décima improvised live. Many of Puerto Rico’s festivals host a concurso de trovadores, a trovador competition, where singers improvise décimas and face off in controversias before a crowd. These competitions are the living, breathing tradition at its most exciting.

The Yauco Coffee Festival is a prime example. In the coffee country of the southwest, the festival features exactly this kind of trovador competition, cuatro and voice and improvised verse in the heart of the mountains that gave the music its home. Our guide to the Yauco National Coffee Festival covers the event, and the town’s own Yauco guide can help you plan a visit.

Christmas is the season of the décima. Through the long holiday stretch from late November into January, the aguinaldo (the festive sung form tied to the décima) fills the island, and the parranda, the house-to-house caroling tradition, brings improvised verse to doorsteps across the mountain towns. Visit in December and you are there for the tradition’s peak.

Cultural festivals in the interior round out the calendar. Events celebrating jíbaro heritage across the central mountains and coffee country regularly feature trova, and our guide to the Taíno heritage of Puerto Rico covers some of the same roots that feed this music.

Do not expect to find a trovador improvising at a San Juan beach bar on a random night. The décima lives in festivals, Christmas, and cultural gatherings, so seek it out with a little planning and you will find something no recording can capture.

Frequently asked questions

Have you heard a trovador improvise?

The décima is one of those traditions that has to be seen to be believed, a poet inventing perfect rhyming verse faster than most people can talk. Have you witnessed a concurso de trovadores, heard a controversia, or been called out by name in an improvised décima at a festival? Tell us in the comments. If you know a festival, a town, or a time of year where the trova runs strong, share it so other travelers can seek out this remarkable art.