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[2][3] The history of the creation of the barrios of Puerto Rico can be traced to the 19th century, when historical documents first mention them.

Historians have speculated that their creation may have been related to the Puerto Rican representation at the Cortes of Cádiz.

[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.

[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.