Created by: roberto.c.alfredo in united-states on
The randomizer has finally found a loophole.
Or at least, that was my first thought when it landed on Barceloneta, Puerto Rico.
This series is supposed to be a random journey through the counties of the United States. Puerto Rico does not have counties. It has municipios, 78 of them, each with its own mayor and municipal government.
But according to the U.S. Census Bureau, those municipios are officially treated as county equivalents.
So Barceloneta counts.
And after wandering around it on Street View for a while, I am very glad it does.
Barceloneta sits on Puerto Rico's northern coast, west of San Juan, with a population of a little over 22,000 people. It was founded in 1881 from territory that had belonged to neighboring Manatí and Arecibo. Its landscape reaches from the Atlantic coastal plain into greener interior country, but one of the municipality's defining modern features is industry. Barceloneta has long been associated especially with pharmaceutical manufacturing, enough to acquire the nickname La Ciudad Industrial. The Census Bureau estimated its population at 22,316 in 2025, while EnciclopediaPR traces the municipio's origins to its foundation in 1881.
That industrial history matters, because the first Street View scene I found is almost aggressively familiar.
If you dropped me into this image with the location hidden, I am not sure I would guess Puerto Rico.
There is a McDonald's. There is a Taco Bell with Pizza Hut attached. There are traffic lights suspended over a wide multilane road, cars turning into parking lots, utility wires, palm trees clipped into corporate landscaping, and a large modern commercial building across the intersection.