La Libertad (Ecuador)
Coordinates: 2 ° 14 ′ S , 80 ° 54 ′ W
La Libertad is a port city and oil refining site in Ecuador . The city is located in the western Santa Elena Province, newly formed in November 2007, on the Santa Elena Peninsula on the Santa Elena Bay of the Pacific Ocean . In the last census of 2001 it had 77,646 inhabitants and for 2007 it can be estimated at around 95,000 inhabitants. The city is the seat of the canton of La Libertad, which is congruent with the urban area.
geography
The Santa Elena peninsula is climatically a continuation of the coastal desert in northern Peru, which is why the climate in La Libertad is dry (about 100 mm of rainfall per year).
La Libertad has several beaches. The Malecón dike is currently being renewed from a touristic point of view based on the model of the Malecón 2000 in Guayaquil .
La Libertad has practically grown together with the neighboring cities of Salinas and Santa Elena .
history
Although the area was populated thousands of years ago, as ceramic finds in the La Caleta district show, La Libertad as a city has a relatively short history. Small fishing villages existed around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries under the names La Hueca and Propicia . Until 1918 today's La Libertad was called Agujereada , although it was still a village. The name Agujereada (in English the holey ) came from the irregular topography of the area, which is crossed by two watersheds .
In 1933, under the name La Libertad, adopted in 1918, the place became the regular rural parish of the canton of Santa Elena . Since 1937 it was part of the newly founded Canton of Salinas . In 1993, La Libertad officially became the city and at the same time the capital of a newly established canton of the same name in the Guayas province . In November 2007, after lengthy negotiations and sometimes violent strikes and roadblocks, the Ecuadorian National Congress established a new province of Santa Elena from the cantons of Santa Elena, Salinas and La Libertad on the Santa Elena peninsula in the former west of the province of Guayas.
oil
La Libertad achieved its importance and its present size primarily through oil production in the west of the Santa Elena Peninsula. Production began regularly in 1925 in Ancón, which belongs to Santa Elena and is located near La Libertad, and was then expanded.
The English company Anglo-Ecuadorian Oilfields, Ltd., which is responsible for the extraction and processing . , La Anglo for short , built the settlements of Puerto Rico and Las Acacias for their workers and engineers in the 1920s and 1930s , which today are the main focus of La Libertad. The port was inaugurated in 1927.
In 1928 the construction of a refinery began, which soon went into operation. The plant, which has been modernized several times, has been operated by Petroecuador's subsidiary Petroproducción since 1990 .
Remarks
- ↑ Update with annual population growth of 3.45% 1990-2001 (based on data from the Ecuadorian Institute for Statistics ( memento of the original from August 24, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this note. ). The website of the city government assumes an annual growth rate of 12% and estimates the population for 2007 at 153,259 ( Memento of the original from September 28, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. which is not very realistic.
Web links
- City administration website (Spanish)
- Homepage of the Prefecture of the Province of Guayas (Spanish)