Arroyo
Samuel Morse built Latin America's first telegraph here in 1859 to reach his daughter two miles away—Arroyo evolved from sugar trains to Stryker surgical implants, still transmitting.
Arroyo exists because of a creek where travelers paused to drink—and because Samuel Morse needed to talk to his daughter. In 1859, the inventor of the telegraph strung a two-mile wire between his son-in-law's sugar hacienda and the family home in town, inaugurating Latin America's first telegraph line. The coat of arms still bears two silver telegraph poles: a small municipality's claim to having connected an entire hemisphere.
The town that hosted this technological birth was itself a product of sugar's golden age. Founded officially on Christmas Day 1855, Arroyo had developed around the Central Lafayette sugar mill and the plantation economy that fed it. When railroads arrived to haul cane to processing centers, Arroyo became a node in the island's narrow-gauge network—the Tren del Sur that would later survive as a tourist curiosity long after commercial sugar traffic ceased.
Arroyo carries a darker inheritance in its nicknames. According to local legend, 19th-century residents either burned or drowned a generous neighbor who contracted cholera or plague, earning the town the title 'Pueblo Ingrato'—Ungrateful Town. Whether the story is true or apocryphal, modern Arroyo has worked to rebrand itself as 'Pueblo Grato,' Grateful Town, a linguistic redemption that mirrors the economic transformation from sugar monoculture to diversified manufacturing.
Today Arroyo's 18,000 residents live in an economy increasingly defined by pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturing—Stryker Corporation operates a surgical implant facility here. The sugar trains are gone, the telegraph poles are monuments, but the pattern persists: Arroyo as a transmission point, whether for molasses, Morse code, or medical technology. By 2026, the question is whether manufacturing holds or follows sugar into memory.