La Libertad, La Libertad

La Libertad is a municipality in the La Libertad Department of El Salvador. It had a population of 35,997 inhabitants in 2007 according to the official census of that year. It is one of the main tourist attractions in the country.HistoryIn 1770 this area was referred to by Pedro Cortes, the Archbishop of Guatemala, as the "hacienda Tepeahua", one of the largest estates in the parish of San Jacinto. The region was known as Tepeahua, a name derived from a Nahuatl expression meaning "mountain of the oak trees", before the Congress of the Federal Republic of Central America authorized the name "Puerto de La Libertad" on February 24, 1824. The national assembly chartered commercial trade on the Pacific coast in 1831, and the first steamboat arrived at La Libertad on June 7, 1857.La Libertad was incorporated as a village by an Executive decree of July 19, 1858, which was approved by the Congress on February 11, 1859. This was done to relieve the community's excessive dependence on the town of Huizúcar, located at a considerable distance and connected by bad roads.The town became part of the department of La Libertad on January 28, 1865, and by 1869 had a population of 266 inhabitants. On May 4, 1867, the Salvadoran government awarded the contract for construction of an iron pier, which opened on October 7, 1869. Prior to this, barges were unloaded by securing them with mooring lines. The Salvadoran government enfranchised La Libertad as a villa on March 10, 1874, and as a ciudad on 23 August 1957. The telegraph line between San Salvador and the port was inaugurated on April 27, 1870.