Puerto Rico Highway 123

Puerto Rico Highway 123 (PR-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. By the early 20th century, it was already graced with many bungalow-style summerhouses.

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 1887, the Ponce Municipal Assembly issued a resolution to use vagrants in the construction of this road, to add to the labor already being performed by prisoners. 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. During his 1910 surveys, American surveyor William H. Armstrong called the road "a beautiful work of engineering." According to Armstrong, the road was 29 kilometers long and had 87 bridges and culverts.

Construction details
The road was built in 13 segments as follows:

Characteristics
The road is prone to landslides and closings due to frequent heavy rains.