Torreón Municipality

Torreón is one of the municipalities of Coahuila de Zaragoza, a state in north-eastern Mexico. The city of Torreón is the municipal seat for Torreón Municipality. The municipality covers an area of 1947.7 km².

As of 2010, the municipality had a total population of 639,629.

References

Torreón

Torreón (Spanish pronunciation: [toreˈon]) is a city and seat of Torreón Municipality in the Mexican state of Coahuila. As of 2010, the city's population was 608,836 with 639,629 in the municipality. The metropolitan population, including Matamoros Municipality, and Gómez Palacio Municipality and Lerdo Municipality in adjacent Durango, was 1,215,993. It is the ninth-biggest metropolitan area in the country and is one of Mexico's most important economic and industrial centers. Torreón is served by Francisco Sarabia International Airport, an airport with flights to several cities in Mexico and the United States.

History

According to archaeological findings, the area of Torreón was populated around the 10th millennium BC.

The first Spanish mission arrived in 1566, led by Fr. Pedro Espinareda. However, the city developed only in the independent Mexican era, around a Torreón ("Big Tower") built to monitor Río Nazas's floods, in conjunction with the creation of a railroad connecting to the US border city of El Paso, which gave an economic boom to the city and therefore a population boom as well. The population grew from 200 in 1892 to 34,000 in 1910. Torreón received city status in 1907.