Barrios of Puerto Rico

[1] Puerto Rico's 78 municipios are divided into geographical sections called barrios (English: wards or boroughs or neighborhoods) and, as of 2010, there were 902 of them.

[2][3] The history of the creation of the barrios of Puerto Rico can be traced to the 19th century, when historical documents first mention them.

[11][12] The downtown district of each town was called pueblo until 1990, when they began to be referred to as barrio-pueblo in the US Census, and contains the plaza, municipal buildings and a Roman Catholic church.

Their purpose was originally for the collection of taxes,[27] but during the 1800s any political authority barrios had been centralized in the municipal governments.

[30] Land and property deeds and surveys are all performed with barrio names as a mandatory reference.

[31] The 902 barrios of Puerto Rico represent officially established primary legal divisions of the seventy-eight municipalities that contain unique and permanent geographical land boundaries.

[38] Puerto Rico barrio boundaries were established using landmarks such as "the top of a mountain", "the lot owned by Franscico Mattei", "the peak of a mountain ridge", "an almond tree" (árbol de húcar), and "to origin of Loco River".

[a] When describing the boundaries of Las Piedras, the official 1952 document by the Puerto Rico Planning Board stated "the border continues through Cándido Márquez's and Jesús Barrio's farms until reaching a mamey tree.

This tree is about 50 meters south of Leoncio Rivera's home..."[39] As these descriptors tended to lend themselves to ambiguity and other problems, there was a 2002 initiative by the University of Puerto Rico to describe boundaries using GPS technology.