Only government and manufacturing exceed tourism in importance to the Puerto Rican economy. The industry has grown rapidly, from 65,000 tourists in 1950 to 1,088,000 in 1970, to 5 million per year in the early 2000s. Tourism employs approximately 60,000 workers.
Many hotels are located in San Juan, though the eastern part of the island also features hotels and resorts. Most tourists come for sunning, swimming, deep-sea fishing, and the fashionable shops, night clubs, and casinos of San Juan's Condado Strip. Attractions of old San Juan include two fortresses, El Morro and San Cristobal, San Jose Church (one of the oldest in the New World), and La Fortaleza, the governor's palace. The government has been encouraging tourists to journey outside of San Juan to such destinations such as the Arecibo Observatory (with its radio telescope use for research astronomy, ionospheric studies, and radar mapping), the rain forest of El Yunque, Phosphorescent Bay, colonial-style San German, and the bird sanctuary and mangrove forest on the shores of Torrecilla Lagoon. The 53-acre (21-hectare) San Juan harbor fortifications are a national historic site.
As of 2002, there were 1,826,052 registrations in hotels and paradores , 1,032,629 of which came from the United States. The room occupancy rate was 61.8%. During 2000/01, visitors spent $2.7 billion in Puerto Rico, a 14.2% increase over 1999/00. The 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the US had a negative impact on the Puerto Rican tourist industry, however, as did the 2003 USS-led war in Iraq. The World Travel and Tourism Council estimated that the war in Iraq cost Puerto Rico $262 million in lost tourism revenue and 3,800 jobs.