San Pedro Sula
San Pedro Sula is a city in the nation of
Honduras. It is in the northwest of the country in the Sula Valley, some 60 km south of
Puerto Cortés on the
Caribbean Sea. With a population of about 700,000 people (
2006 estimate), it is the second largest city in the country behind the Honduran capital
Tegucigalpa, and is considered the economic heartland of Honduras. It is the capital of Honduras's
Cortés department. It is also known as the Industrial Capital of Honduras. The city hosts a large
Palestinian-Honduran community.
The city has a
museum of
archeology and
history, which includes
Pre-Columbian artifacts. The
cigar making business is important here, as are factories for making clothes.
San Pedro Sula International Airport (SAP) is the major
airport in Honduras.
Real C.D. España is their best known
football team while
Club Deportivo Marathón is the most popular team in this city. There is the
Estadio Olimpico Metropolitano. It is generally easier and cheaper to fly into San Pedro Sula from abroad than to fly into the capital Tegucigalpa.
San Pedro Sula was founded on
June 27,
1536, by
Pedro de Alvarado with the name
Villa de San Pedro de Puerto Caballos. The Spanish of "villa" was one step below city status at this time. There were around 18 indian towns ( "pueblos de indios" ) in the valley at this time, and their labor service (
repartimiento) was divided among the Spanish Conquistadors. Early descriptions of the landscape around San Pedro indicate that there was abundant swamp land and dense tropical forests, with little land good for agriculture or cattle nearby. San Pedro becomes San Pedro Sula in the 18th century, after undergoing many transformations of its name.
Puerto Caballos was the Spanish port town on the coast, along the south shore of the Laguna de Alvarado, where
Puerto Cortes is today. For the first few years of its history, San Pedro was the colonial mint, where gold, found to the west in the Naco, Sula, and Quimistan valleys, had to be brought to smelt, and where the Spanish Crown's fifth of the value of the gold was collected. After the mint was moved to
Comayagua, San Pedro a very small town with few permanent residents until the late 18th century.
San Pedro was founded near the modern town of
Choloma, but moved closer to the Chamelecon river sometime in the 16th century. It was soon to discover that being on the river meant that pirates (French, Dutch, and English) would come up river and attack the town. San Pedro was sacked and burned in the 17th century, and the city moved again, this time to its modern location, further south and away from the rivers.
The Spanish didn't consider the area around San Pedro to be a healthy place to live, preferring the higher, dryer valleys to the west and south. As such, San Pedro soon languished as a backwater with few Spanish inhabitants. It grew from a size of about 8 residents in 1590, to almost 2000 by the 1890s. The building of a rail line between San Pedro and the coast, and connecting the banana plantations to the ports of
Tela and
Puerto Cortes began the development of San Pedro as an industrial city. Today it has a population well over a million people, and is officially the second largest city in Honduras (though many will tell you it is the largest).
San Pedro, whose name has evolved over the years to San Pedro Sula (after the mines to the west), was officially recognized as a city by the
Congress of Honduras on
October 8,
2002, long after it had grown to be the industrial capital of Honduras, and the second largest city in the country.
Portland, Oregon,
USA*
Interactive Map of San Pedro Sula*
Honduras Travel Site with Ideas for San Pedro Sula
