Puerto Rico Highway 123

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.

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.