of Playa As the major means of external communication for the settlement that was to become the city of Ponce, barrio Playa has a history that is as old as the history of the city of Ponce itself, thus dating back to the 16th century. During the 16th century, barrio Playa was called
Montones. Subsequently, during the 17th and 18th centuries, significant contraband took place on these shores as well as attempts to attack and ransack the Playa settlement. A lookout post was set up in
El Vigia to warn the city of the need of help in the Playa harbor, a port settlement at the time. By the 1830s, la Playa had one of the best roads in Puerto Rico, connecting the shore settlement to the city proper, and it was the center of Ponce's commercial activity. It subsequently also got the first phone lines in Ponce and was also the first one to get railroad service from downtown Ponce. Unfortunately, in 1845 a significant fire occurred in La Playa. The fire destroyed Playa and most of the Ponce vicinity. It significantly damaged the
Spanish Customs House in Ponce, this being one of the few building left standing after the fire. The fire burned down the major buildings of the "Marina de Ponce". This was followed by the building of
Cayo Cardona lighthouse in 1889, on a small island at the entrance of the Ponce harbor. Both of these islands are part of barrio Playa. By 1913, Playa was "a dynamic neighborhood with a self-sustained urban development with a population of 5,169 distributed through a residential area dominated by wooden houses, sugar cane farms, churches, schools, hospitals, a cemetery and local indiustries that promoted the formation of a strong artisan and industrial workers class." In 1929, La Playa was the place where Dr.
Manuel de la Pila Iglesias worked for the U.S. federal government with such distinction as to earn him the title "physician of physicians." Today, Playa is a mostly low-income barrio of Ponce, and thus this is where
Isolina Ferré founded her "Centro de Orientacion de la Playa" hospital and school that would earn her the U.S.
Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1999. The Ponce Playa Diagnostic and Treatment Center was also founded in barrio Playa de Ponce. ==Landmarks==