La Libertad, El Salvador

La Libertad «Liberty» 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.

In 1770 this area was referred to by Pedro Cortes, the Archbishop of Guatemala (1776–1779), as the "hacienda Tepeahua", one of the largest estates in the parish of San Jacinto. The region was known as Tepehua, 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" (Port of Freedom) 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.