Taíno sun (Sol de Jayuya)
A petroglyph on the Zamas mural in Jayuya, Puerto Rico: a round face ringed by circles. It is known as the Sol de Jayuya (sun of Jayuya); the municipality says Jayuya’s cultural centre named it and made it its seal, and it is now seen all over the island.
Meaning
The Municipality of Jayuya describes the Sol de Jayuya as one of the petroglyphs of the Zamas mural, a carved rock on a farm in the barrio of Zamas, on the slope of Cerro Puntita, the highest peak in Puerto Rico. The petroglyphs are thought to have been cut in low relief by the Taíno before 1493, and the archaeologist Ricardo Alegría judged the mural the most complete in the Antilles. The name is modern. According to the municipality, the Centro Cultural Jayuyano gave it after Alegría, visiting the mural with a group from Jayuya in 1968, told them the design appeared nowhere else in Puerto Rico. Today it is the centre’s official seal, printed on everything it publishes and used at Jayuya’s Festival Nacional Indígena, and it turns up on fabrics and jewellery across the island.
Origin and history
Nobody knows for certain what the petroglyphs are, the municipality says. Some people see a sun in the Sol de Jayuya; others think it is a turtle. The municipality’s own suggestion is that the Zamas mural may have been an altar to Yocahú Vagua Maorocotí, the Yúcahu of later writers, and to other deities, which it offers as no more than probable.
Sun figures in Puerto Rico’s rock art
Sun figures were among the petroglyphs recorded by Jesse Walter Fewkes of the Bureau of American Ethnology, publishing in 1907, found some of the island’s best carvings on river boulders near Utuado, and labelled two figures on one boulder as the sun. On another rock in the same stream he drew a human face with a circle of radiating lines above it, “recalling solar rays”. The circle, he noted, is a common ornament on Taíno pottery, idols, stools and carved shells.
The sun in the stories Pané recorded
Friar Ramón Pané, whom Columbus commissioned on his second voyage (1493–96) to record the islanders’ ceremonies and antiquities, was told that the sun and the moon came out of a cave. The people held the cave in high regard; it was painted all over in their fashion “without any figure, with many leaves and other things of that sort”.
From the Zamas rock to an island emblem
The municipality lists where it has seen the Sol de Jayuya: at Villa Taína in Boquerón, on fabrics, jewellery, embroidery and even perfume bottles. In its words, the Centro Cultural Jayuyano has managed to spread the petroglyph across the whole island. It has travelled further. The Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia holds a vejigante carnival mask made in Chicago in 2018 by Juan M. Roman Jr., a sun with horns for rays, and its catalogue explains the mask through the Sol de Jayuya. The museum calls the name one given by archaeologists; the municipality credits the Centro Cultural Jayuyano.
Read next
- Next in Taíno symbolsCoquí (the frog)The coquí is Puerto Rico’s small tree frog, named for its call, and a national symbol of the island. Frogs are carved on Taíno stones and amulets, and in a story the friar Ramón Pané recorded in the 1490s, children left without their mothers turned into frogs.
- The same shape in Historical flagsYellow Dragon FlagThe national flag of China under the Qing dynasty: a yellow flag with a blue dragon and a red disc. It began as a triangular flag for government ships in the 1860s; the Regulations for the Beiyang Fleet of 1888 made it rectangular, and it flew until the dynasty fell.
See also
Turtle, Zemí (cemí), Atabey (the Woman of Caguana), Guabancex (the hurricane), Bat (opía, the spirits of the dead), Duho (ceremonial seat).
Sources
- El Sol de Jayuya (Municipio de Jayuya), Municipio de Jayuya, Turismo, Lugares de interés: “El Sol de Jayuya”, Municipio de Jayuya (Gobierno de Puerto Rico), page text
- Jesse Walter Fewkes, The Aborigines of Porto Rico and Neighboring Islands (1907), Twenty-fifth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1903–04, Washington, 1907, Bureau of American Ethnology, pp. 150–153 and list of plates (plate LX)
- Ramón Pané, An Account of the Antiquities of the Indians, c. 1498 (Bourne’s translation, 1906), Edward Gaylord Bourne, “Columbus, Ramon Pane and the Beginnings of American Anthropology”, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, 1906: Pané’s account translated from Ulloa’s Italian text of 1571, with Eden’s 1555 English of Peter Martyr, American Antiquarian Society (Internet Archive), Bourne’s introduction; chapter XI
- Mask, 3428/1 (MOA, University of British Columbia), Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, catalogue record 3428/1, Vejigante mask by Juan M. Roman Jr. (2018), via the Reciprocal Research Network, Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, Description; History Of Use; Iconographic Meaning; Item History
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from circles.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 10, 2026. How we research
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