Backpacking Diplomacy by Andy A blog dedicated to sharing world culture, travel tips and building community.
Reading time: about 6 minutes.
TL;DR
Sending a post card from Puerto Rico costs 65 cents to a US address and $1.75 to anywhere else in the world, one flat international rate. Ask for postcard stamps rather than Forever stamps and you save 17 cents each. The cards themselves are the harder part: the racks in Old San Juan carry the same mass-printed designs as everywhere else, so the good ones come from artisan markets, museum shops, and secondhand stalls.
Why bother, in one paragraph
I have written at length about the art of sending postcards, so I will not repeat all of it here. The short version: a postcard takes effort, and effort is the entire point. You have to find one, write it, buy a stamp, and mail it, and none of that is convenient. That inconvenience is what makes the thing land when it shows up in someone’s mailbox three weeks later.
There is no word in English for the feeling of finding an unexpected handwritten card among your bills. There should be.
Why I still send postcards, in under a minute.
Where to find postcards worth sending in Puerto Rico
The default option is the souvenir shop, and the default option is mostly disappointing. The racks on Calle Fortaleza carry the same handful of designs: El Morro at sunset, a beach, a coquí. Fine if that is what you want. But there is better.
Artisan markets. The weekend kiosks along Paseo de la Princesa in Old San Juan are where local makers sell directly, and several sell printed art, photography, and small-run cards alongside jewelry and carvings. Town festivals across the island are the same story. Our guide to Puerto Rican souvenirs covers how to tell locally made work from imports, and the same test applies to paper: ask who made it.
Museum and gallery shops. Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, Museo de Arte de Ponce, and smaller municipal museums often carry cards reproducing works from their own collections. These tend to be better printed than anything on a spinner rack, and the money stays closer to home.
Bookshops and independent cafés. Cards from local illustrators show up in places that are not primarily selling to tourists, which is exactly why they are worth finding.
Secondhand and antique stalls. This is my favorite category and it is covered below.
Make your own. I designed a set of postcards for Yauco and a second set for Puerto Rico more broadly, printed through Moo. The card stock came out firm and the image quality was high. If you have photographs from a trip and a little patience, this is more satisfying than anything you will buy.
Vintage Puerto Rico postcards, and a trick for dating them
The Golden Age of postcards ran roughly from 1890 to 1915, and Puerto Rico landed in the middle of it at exactly the moment the United States took the island. The result is a large body of surviving cards from a specific and complicated period.
The names worth knowing: the Detroit Publishing Company, which produced widely circulated views including San Juan’s harbor, and the Waldrop Photographic Company, which shot scenes around San Juan in 1909, including Borinquen Park and the San Antonio Bridge at Fort Geronimo. Many of these are held today by the New York Public Library and other archives.
The “Porto Rico” test
Here is the useful part, and it is a piece of history most sellers will not tell you.
On January 15, 1899, the US military government changed the island’s official name to “Porto Rico.” The misspelling came from the English text of the Treaty of Paris and stuck for three decades. Puerto Ricans never accepted it. In December 1931, Resident Commissioner Félix Córdova Dávila introduced a resolution to restore the correct spelling, submitting a petition from the Puerto Rican senate that called “Porto Rico” an impure idiomatic compound and asked that justice be done to the island’s history, language, and traditions.
Congress restored the name on May 17, 1932. The House vote was 88 to 31.
So: if a card says “Porto Rico,” it was printed before 1932. That single detail dates a card instantly, and it also tells you that the card was made during the period when the island’s own name was being decided by people who did not live there. Our guide to whether you need Spanish in Puerto Rico covers the wider version of that story.
Worth knowing before you buy: many vintage cards depict the island through a colonial lens, including staged scenes of rural poverty sold as exotica. That does not make them unfit to collect. It makes them documents, and worth looking at as such.
Look for them at flea markets, antique shops in Old San Juan and Ponce, and estate sales. Collectors call the hobby deltiology, and dedicated marketplaces exist online if you would rather browse from home.
Unfortunately, due to the island’s tropical climate, I doubt many pre-1932 cards are still floating around, but you never know. You are just as likely to find an antique card in a market of Madrid or Rome or even more likely in New York City.
How to send a postcard from Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico is served by USPS, so this works exactly as it does anywhere in the United States. That is simpler than most of the Caribbean.
Stamps: ask for the right one
This is the tip that saves you money and almost nobody knows it.
USPS sells a dedicated postcard stamp at a lower rate than the standard Forever stamp. As of the July 2026 rate change:
| What you are sending | Rate |
|---|---|
| Postcard to a US address, including within Puerto Rico | 65 cents |
| Letter to a US address (Forever stamp) | 82 cents |
| Postcard to any international destination | $1.75 |
Two things follow from that table. First, using a Forever stamp on a domestic postcard wastes 17 cents every time, and clerks will sell you Forever stamps by default unless you ask. Say “postcard stamps, please” or “sellos para postales, por favor.”
Second, international postcard postage is one flat price to every country. Japan, France, Australia, Brazil, all $1.75. You do not need to work out zones. Buy Global Forever stamps if you want the rate locked in.
Rates change, usually twice a year, so confirm at the counter.
Where to mail them
Post offices are the reliable option and there are branches across the island, including Old San Juan. The clerks are used to this.
Blue USPS collection boxes work fine and are collected on a posted schedule. Check the pickup times on the door.
Your hotel will usually mail cards for you, which is convenient and slightly less fun.
One honest note: mail moving between Puerto Rico and the mainland can be slower than mainland-to-mainland. Allow a couple of weeks domestically and longer internationally, and mail early if the card needs to arrive by a date.
Art Deco Post Office in Santurce
If you want to mail your post cards from a beautiful building, one unique post office that I can recommend is the post office in Santurce. The post office is pink and designed with an art deco façade. It’s conveniently located down the street from a great street art scene too, so why not do both?
United States Postal Service, San Juan
Branches operate across the island. Search “USPS” plus your town, and ask at the counter for postcard stamps.
Open in Google MapsAbout my cards
I made postcards for Yauco and for Puerto Rico generally because I could not find what I wanted in shops. They came out well and I have given away most of the first batch.
There is no shop on this site yet. I would like to build one when I find a way to do it that makes sense. In the meantime, if you want a set, get in touch and we will figure something out.
FAQ
Can you mail a postcard from Puerto Rico to the United States as domestic mail?
Yes. Puerto Rico is a US territory served by USPS, so a card to any US address uses the domestic postcard rate of 65 cents, the same as mailing between two states.
How long does a postcard take to arrive from Puerto Rico?
Domestic mail generally runs a few days to two weeks. International varies much more, from about two weeks to over a month depending on destination. Part of the appeal is not knowing.
What size does a postcard need to be?
The standard is 4 by 6 inches, or 10 by 15 cm. Cards larger than about 4.25 by 6 inches get charged at letter rates, and cards below the USPS minimum thickness of 0.007 inches will not qualify for postcard postage at all. If you print your own, use proper card stock.
Where can I buy stamps in Puerto Rico other than a post office?
Some pharmacies, supermarkets, and hotel front desks carry Forever stamps, but they rarely stock the cheaper postcard stamps. For those, go to a post office.
Are old Puerto Rico postcards worth anything?
Some are. Value depends on age, condition, subject, publisher, and whether the card was postally used with a legible cancellation. Cards showing buildings or landscapes that no longer exist tend to be the most sought after.
Do I need a return address on a postcard?
No, and it uses space you probably want for writing. The tradeoff is that an undeliverable card without one cannot come back to you.
Send one and tell me
Every trip I take, I mail a few. Some arrive in a week, some take months, one from Vietnam took nearly half a year and was better for it.
If you have sent a post card from Puerto Rico, where did you find it and how long did it take to land? And if you know a shop or a market stall on the island selling cards made by local artists, name it in the comments. That list is hard to build from the outside and I would rather have it from people who have been.
More Puerto Rico: the country hub, our souvenir guide, and how to support local businesses here.
