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San Pedro Sula ((:sam ˈpeðɾo ˈsula)) is a city in Honduras. The city is located in the northwest corner of the country, in the Valle de Sula (Sula Valley), about south of Puerto Cortés on the Caribbean Sea. With an estimated population of one million in the main municipality, and 1,445,598 in its metro area (2010), it is the second largest city, after the capital Tegucigalpa. It is the capital of the Cortés Department. ==Early years== San Pedro Sula was founded on 27 June 1536, by Pedro de Alvarado under the name Villa de San Pedro de Puerto Caballos, close to the town of Choloma. There were around 18 towns populated by indigenous people in the Sula valley at the time. Early descriptions of the landscape indicate abundant swampland and dense tropical forests, with little land good for agriculture or cattle raising. The city's name became San Pedro Sula in the 18th century, after several changes. The "Sula" part of its name comes from the ''Minas de Sula'', gold mines located to the west of the village of Naco. For the first few years of its history, San Pedro was the colonial mint, where gold was brought to smelt, and where the Spanish Crown collected a fifth of the value of the gold. The mint was moved to Gracias, and ultimately to Comayagua in the 1550s. The city grew slowly from about 800 residents in 1590, to almost 10,000 by the 1890s, but most of this population growth took place in the 19th century. It benefited initially from the growth of bananas for export in the 1870s and 1880s and formed a close relationship with U.S. based shipper and railroad entrepreneur Samuel Zemurray's Cuyamel Fruit Company, and the construction of the Interoceanic Railroad between 1869 and 1874 which connected the city to the coast at Puerto Cortés. Zemurray worked closely with local elites who invested in subsidiary enterprises and thus shaped the way politically for Cuyamel to establish itself and, along the way to pay very few taxes.〔Dario Euraque, ''Reinterperting the Banana Republic: Region and State in Honduras, 1870–1972'' (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1996) pp. 25–27.〕 San Pedro Sula was officially recognized as a city by the Congress of Honduras on 8 October 1902. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「San Pedro Sula」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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