La Carolina
municipality of Spain
La Carolina is a city and municipality located in the province of Jaén, Spain. According to the 2024 census, the municipality has a population of 14,681 inhabitants.
History
La Carolina was formerly the capital of the Intendencia of the Nuevas Poblaciones de Sierra Morena y Andalucía founded in this formerly remote and desolate area of the Sierra Morena in 1767 by King Charles III. The object of the plan, drawn up by his minister Pablo de Olavide, administrator of Andalusia, was to populate the area around Despeñaperros gorge. Known as "the gateway to Andalusia", this pass was a notorious point on the Cádiz-to-Madrid route for bandits. Other towns of note in this plan were La Carlota and La Luisiana. The Intendencia administrative division was wrapped up in 1813.
Six thousand Catholic settlers arrived from Belgium, Germany, Austria and Switzerland to take advantage of the generous offers of land and livestock being made to colonizers (five chickens, five goats, five sheep, two cows, and a sow per family). Within a few years, about half of them had died from illness or gone home: the rest gradually lost their national identities over the years, and took on the language and customs of their host country. One can still find people in this area with Germanic surnames such as Eisman, Minch, Clap, Smidt, Ming and Kobler.
The town's relatively recent history, as well as its northern European target population, explains its unusually regular, colonial-style grid layout, with wide avenues, as opposed to the more common winding narrow streets typical of the Moorish-patterned towns in Andalusia.
“La Carolina” enters the record as municipality of Spain. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Carolina, municipality and Spain can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“La Carolina” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Carolina, municipality and Spain provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q649981. VIAF identifies the subject as 147859759. The Library of Congress control number is n88234091. Authority coordinates are 38.274, -3.615. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2024, 1767 and 1813.
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This entry incorporates text from “La Carolina” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.