Existed: circa 1910 – present North end: Arecibo | South end: PR-12 in Playa, Ponce | |
Puerto Rico Highway 123 is a secondary highway that connects the city Arecibo to the city of Ponce. It runs through the towns of Utuado and Adjuntas, before reaching Ponce. A parallel road is being built, PR-10, that is expected to take on most of the traffic currently using PR-123.
Contents
Map of PR-123, Puerto Rico
History
The road dates from the late 19th century and it started as a road to link the coffee-farming mountain town of Adjuntas to the southern port city of Ponce for the export of coffee. Eventually the road was completed to the smaller northern port city of Arecibo as well, connecting the mountain town of Utuado in its way.
PR-123 was built under the colonial government of Spain in Puerto Rico to connect the coffee-growing town of Adjuntas to the port city of Ponce as a farm-to-market road.
The construction of the first Ponce to Adjuntas road got underway through the dedicated efforts of local political leader, attorney, and composer Olimpio Otero in the late nineteenth century. In 1903, the Puerto Rico Legislature named a bridge on the Ponce to Adjuntas section of the road to his memory for his outstanding dedication to the building of that stretch of the road. The bridge is located in the Magueyes barrio of the municipality of Ponce.
True to its farm-to-market purpose, PR-123 was designed to descend from the mountain town of Adjuntas and make its way through the Cordillera Central until it reached the city of Ponce, edging Plaza Las Delicias, located just two blocks from the Plaza del Mercado de Ponce fruits-and-vegetables central market place. The road then continued south to the port of Ponce where coffee and other farm products were shipped to the United States and Europe.
Prior to the construction of a new road (see PR-10) that took its number, the road was signed "PR-10". This route signing for this old, winding road can still be seen in some old street maps of the city of Ponce.
The stretch from Ponce to Adjuntas was built under the Spanish government. The remainder of the route to Arecibo was built after the Americans took over in 1898. This second stretch opened on July 1, 1904. The whole course of the road from its southern end in Ponce to its northern end in Arecibo was signed as Road No. 6 in those days.
Navigating this first PR-10 road was very tedious as the road was engineered to run from mountainside to mountainside, following the contours of the mountains, and along the natural definitions of the course of rivers, to reach its destination. Such design, however, limited considerably the speed of travel. It was also necessary to drive through the congested downtown areas of the various towns and villages in the way to get from one terminus of the road to the other, something that proved to be very time-consuming as vehicular traffic in those towns and villages increased. Despite these drawbacks, the road was heavily used for many decades. However, as traffic on this road increased in the 1950s and 1960s, the road started to show its limits.
Characteristics
The road is prone to landslides and closings due to frequent heavy rains.