"El Choliseo"

El Choliseo

By Adam Pinkney

photo by wikipedia

Coliseo de Puerto Rico José Miguel Agrelot is the biggest indoor arena in Puerto Rico. This is the official name and our tour bus driver Jose Pereira elaborated on the name of the arena. A brief background of Jose is that he is a native of Puerto Rico and graduated from the University of Puerto Rico. He studied secondary education in his undergraduate and gerontology public health in graduate school. However, he prefers and loves working as a tour bus driver because He enjoys the interaction with the people.

Jose gave us the inside scoop of the name of this arena. Jose asked a couple of locals walking past the arena and asked them how they pronounce the title. The locals call this place Choliseo instead of Coliseo. This is because it is named after Jose’ Miguel Argelot who was a Puerto Rican comedian and better known as Don Cholitto, which was a character that he always played in his acts.

A young lady named Katalina Puig was the executive coordinator of the arena and she helped give us a guided tour. A funny story is that our classmate Zaina Al-Ghabra actually knew Katalina and had not seen her over four years. It was a coincidence that Zaina ran into an old friend.

According to the tour Choliseo de Puerto Rico is government owned and privately managed. It is owned by Puerto Rico Convention District Authority and managed by SMG. Dr. Subervi explained that the Puerto Rican flag and American flag has to be flown over any government building, which included Coliseo de Puerto Rico.

The capacity of the arena is 18,500. To build it took 50,000 yards of concrete and 7,000 tons of steel. It took 6 years to build and they relocated the original foundation. The foundation was moved to a more urbanized area near the urban train. The last area of the tour was the electrical facility. They explained that there is enough electricity to run the urban train system in emergency situations and vice versa.