The juridical categories of the settlement processes in the region of Santander

Abstract

This article -a small result of an ambitious research project in which five professors of History at the Universidad Industrial de Santander were engagedseeks to put an end to the anachronistic use of the political-administrative categories related to the process of settlement in Santander. Terms such as city town, parish, doctrine, village and municipality have different semantic content in each time period and therefore their use to refer to each movement of regional settlement should be carefully defined. This piece of work examines the juridical sense of the above categories and identifies the settlements corresponding historically to each of them.

Nowadays, after the republican agreement brought about by the municipal regulations subsecuent to 1887, understanding the hierarchisation and preeminence system underlying the Neogranadinan regulations of the settlements is quite difficult for the non-specialist. For this reason we are offering a first attempt to understand the rights an status expressed in their time by the categories of city, town, village an parish.

Key words: Town, city, village, parish, settlement, Santander, doctrine, reservation, municipality.