Hacienda Casa del Francés

1910 plantation house outside Esperanza, a Vieques landmark

The Frenchman's House — a two-storey wooden plantation house with deep verandas and a tin roof — sits in old gardens just north of Esperanza. Built in 1910 at the tail end of the sugar era, it is the most prominent surviving piece of plantation architecture on Vieques and is on the US National Register of Historic Places.

The property has had a long life as a guesthouse and is best seen from the road, where the proportions of the house and the avenue of old palms still convey what wealthy hacienda life looked like. Combine with a stroll round Esperanza or use as a landmark on the drive between the airport and the south coast.

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The house was built in 1910 by a French-Corsican sugar planter, Henri Brau, who arrived in Vieques during the late-nineteenth-century cane boom. By the 1980s sugar was long gone and the hacienda was operating as a beloved if eccentric inn — the kind of place where the bar stayed open until the last guest gave up and went to bed. The property has changed hands several times since but the building, listed on the US National Register of Historic Places, still presides over the road to Esperanza.