It also granted free land to many settlers, as well as incentives for investing money and providing technology for agricultural development to Spaniards willing to relocate and settle there.

[1] This was the third royal decree of graces approved by the Spanish Crown to foster economic development in the empire's overseas Latin American possessions.

They gradually contributed developing commercial enterprises in Puerto Rico, mostly based on agricultural produce like sugarcane, coffee, and tobacco plantations, and on the use of African slave labor and free but needy sharecroppers, peons or jornaleros.

Those who stayed behind to attend the farmlands suffered the widespread crop failures, brought on by long periods of drought and diseases such as the potato fungus which contributed to the Great Famine of the 1840s.

Hundreds of Corsicans, Italians, French, Portuguese, Irish, Scots, Bavarian Germans, Austrians and Croatians[4] attracted by the offers of free land by the Spanish Crown, moved to Puerto Rico and accepted the conditions for settlement.

The royal decree continued in effect until 1898, when Spain finally lost Puerto Rico and Cuba, its last two Latin American possessions, to the United States under the Treaty of Paris that ended the Spanish–American War.