El Toro Trail

Location: Canóvanas

Getting there: Drive for 45 minutes from San Juan to get to the El Toro trailhead on the west side of El Yunque National Forest. Park next to a US Forest Service sign and cross the road. You’ll see an trailhead information sign at the start of the trail. You’ll climb steadily uphill until you get to the peak. 

General Info: This is a challenging 4.9 mile out and back hike with a 1,325 ft elevation gain. Alltrails claims this hike takes less than 3 hours to complete, on average. I think that needs to be updated. The sign at the trailhead says it will take two hours each way. The trail is really, really bad and the hiking is slow going. The trail is verging on overgrown, it’s usually very narrow, is often washed out, sometimes severely, and is almost always extremely muddy. It took me 3 hours to reach the peak and a little over 2 hours to get back down. On the way up I was trying to avoid the mud as much as possible which made for slower going, but couldn’t have added more than 15 minutes. The view from the top is amazing and absolutely worth the effort of the arduous hike up the mountain. You’ll have just about a 360 view from one of the tallest peaks in El Yunque and be able to see the ocean on each side of the island.

Heads up: This is, by far, the hardest hike I have done in Puerto Rico. Make sure to bring plenty of water! It is hot, but you’ll have a lot of shade for much of the hike. Unfortunately, there isn’t much wind for most of it either.