San Salvador, El Salvador

Economy | Financial sector | World Trade Center San Salvador | Centro Financiero Gigante | Alameda Manuel Enrique Araujo and Zona Rosa | Communications | Services and retail shopping | Industry | Urban development

🇸🇻 San Salvador is the capital and the most populous city of El Salvador and its eponymous department. It is the country's political, cultural, educational and financial centre. The Metropolitan Area of San Salvador comprises the capital itself and 13 of its municipalities.

San Salvador is an important financial hub of Central America. The city is home to the Consejo de Ministros de El Salvador (Council of Ministries of El Salvador), the Legislative Assembly of El Salvador, the Supreme Court of El Salvador, and other governmental institutions, as well as the official residence of the President of El Salvador. San Salvador is located in the Salvadoran highlands, surrounded by volcanoes and prone to earthquakes. The city is also home to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of San Salvador, as well as many Protestant branches of Christianity, including Evangelicals, Latter-day Saints, Baptists, and Pentecostals. San Salvador has the second largest Jewish community in Central America and a small Muslim community.

San Salvador has been the host city for various regional and international sporting, political, and social events. It hosted the Central American and Caribbean Games in 1935 and 2002, and the Central American Games in 1977 and 1994, as well as the Miss Universe 1975 pageant. San Salvador was also the host city of the 18th Ibero-American Summit in 2008, the most important sociopolitical event in the Spanish and Portuguese sphere. The Central American Integration System has its headquarters in San Salvador.

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Economy San Salvador disproportionately concentrates economic activity in the country. The metropolitan area accounts for 3% of the national territory but 70% of public and private investment is made there. The economy of San Salvador, Antiguo Cuscatlán, and Santa Tecla is a mixed one composed mainly of services, private education, banking, business headquartering, and industrial manufacturing. Other municipalities in the metropolitan area depend either on industry, like Soyapango and Ilopango, on public services, like Mejicanos, or on power generation, as in Nejapa and Apopa. The other municipalities have not developed their own economies, however, they have provided the workforce required for industry in neighboring municipalities.

San Salvador, as well as the rest of the country, has used the U.S. dollar as its currency of exchange since 2001. Under the Monetary Integration Law, El Salvador adopted the U.S. dollar as a legal tender alongside the colón. This decision came about as an attempt to encourage foreign investors to launch new companies in El Salvador, saving them the inconvenience of conversion to other currencies. San Salvador's economy is mostly based on remittances, followed by service and retail sector, rather by industry or manufacturing.

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Financial sector San Salvador is home to the great majority of corporations in the country, and supports many commercial activities, including food and beverage production; the pharmaceutical and chemical industries; the sale of automobiles, handicrafts, and construction materials; as well as appliance repair. Most national companies have their headquarters in San Salvador, which is also home to regional offices for various transnational entities. Unicomer Group, Almacenes Simán, Grupo Roble, Grupo Real, Excel Automotríz, and Grupo Q all have their central offices in San Salvador. Since the early 2010s there has been a boom in the construction of call centres providing services to national and international companies alike. San Salvador lacks a consolidated financial district; this is mainly due to the lack of urban planning that has plagued the city since the aftermath of the Salvadoran Civil War in 1992. Some clusters have formed, however, in an organic manner; today most of the banking and telecommunications are concentrated along the Alameda Manuel Enrique Araujo in District Two. Various business complexes and towers have sprouted in the commercial districts of Colonia Escalón and Colonia San Benito, both in District Three of the Salvadoran capital.

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World Trade Center San Salvador The World Trade Center San Salvador is located in District 3 (Colonia Escalón) at Avenida Norte and Calle del Mirador. The World Trade Center is interconnected to two hotels (one of which is the Crowne Plaza Hotel), a convention centre and a commercial centre containing retail shops and restaurants. As of October 2012, the centre consists of two towers of 8 levels each, with a total of 13,000 m2 (139,931 sq ft) of office space. Since their completion, the first two towers have maintained a 100% occupancy rate with multinational companies, embassies, and firms such as Banco Multisectorial de Inversiones (BMI), Ericsson, Continental Airlines, Microsoft, Inter-American Development Bank, and Banco Promérica maintaining offices there.

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Centro Financiero Gigante Centro Financiero Gigante is a complex of office buildings consisting of five towers, the highest of which is 77 meters (253 feet) tall and has 19 floors. It is a phased project which began with the construction of the two towers. After several years the number of buildings has increased, and it has become one of the most significant business complexes in San Salvador. The tallest tower is occupied by the Telefónica phone company, the next tallest tower is used by RED Business Communication Systems. The complex also includes the Banco Azteca centre, Stream Global Services representing Dell in Central America, The Israeli Embassy of San Salvador, Tigo, call centres, and other small offices and banks. The project started in 1997 with Phase I, the construction of the two tallest towers. In Phase II a seven-story-high tower for the old Dell company in Central America was built, and in Phase III a 12-story-high tower for Tigo and a 10-story-high tower for Telemovil. The final phase was remodeling of the Telemovil building to convert it into the Banco Azteca Center.

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Alameda Manuel Enrique Araujo and Zona Rosa Along Alameda Manuel Enrique Araujo and Zona Rosa there are many businesses, banks, and financial centres, government institutions and museums. These include AFP Confia, the Superior Council of Public Health, the HSBC Central Office, AFP Crecer, the Ministry of Public Works, the Centro Internacional de Feria y Convenciones (International Center of Fairs and Conventions), the Presidential Palace, the Museo Nacional de Antropología David J. Guzman (National Museum of Anthropology), the Banco Promerica Financial Center, the Ministry of Tourism, the Channel 2 & 4 Studio Center, the Channel 6 Studio Center, and the Centro de Compañía de Alumbrado Eléctrico de San Salvador (CAESS-Centro) or Central Electric Lighting Company of San Salvador.

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Communications A relatively large proportion of residents have telephones, televisions, and access to the internet, and several communications companies have their headquarters in San Salvador. The largest are Tigo, Claro-Telecom, Movistar-Telefónica, and Digicel.

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Services and retail shopping San Salvador's economy is based mostly on the service sector. The city has many restaurants and shopping malls, including Metrocentro, the largest shopping mall in Central America, as well as retail stores such as Wal-Mart, Office Max, and a Pricesmart warehouse club. The tallest shopping mall in the region, Centro Comercial Galerias, was built around and over an old mansion, La Casona, dating from the late 1950s, which was home to a family of Spanish origin, the Guirolas.

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Industry San Salvador has small industrial zones scattered throughout the municipality, although most of them are concentrated in the eastern section near the border with Soyapango. Much of the industry is related to food processing, beverage manufacturing, and sugar refining. Construction materials ranging from ceramic tiles to concrete blocks and concrete are produced in large quantities; plastics extrusion, including the production of piping, is also an important industry.

Industrias La Constancia, El Salvador's largest brewer and bottler of purified water, dominates the Salvadoran export market of beers and bottled water. The company became part of the second largest brewer in the world, SABMiller, in 2005. Its flagship brand is Pilsener, a pilsner style lager beer, the national beer of El Salvador. In 2011, La Constancia centralized its operations and opened its new headquarters in San Salvador, where it moved in 1928 from the Santa Ana Department. The company produces the Agua Cristal brand of bottled water, the best selling in El Salvador and in the Central American region. The Coca-Cola company uses the La Constancia installations to manufacture its beverage brands sold in El Salvador and the rest of Central America.

Unilever has a plant in San Salvador. Its products include foods, beverages, cleaning agents and personal care products. Unilever manufactures all its products sold in Central America in San Salvador.

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Urban development Early colonial development could not anticipate the extensive growth of the city in the following centuries. Thus, the city contains many narrow streets which create traffic problems, and sidewalks are often overcrowded. As the expansion of San Salvador continues, the need for infrastructure improvements becomes more acute.

During the 1960s, urban expansion was most prevalent in the northern and southern parts of the city, while the 1970s saw growth continue further south, north and west. The housing developments of Colonia Miravalle, Montebello, Satellite, Maquilishuat, San Mateo Lomas de San Francisco, Alta Mira, Loma Linda, La Floresta, and Jardines de la Libertad were built during this period.

The expansion of San Salvador, while occurring in all directions, was primarily in the direction of the volcano of San Salvador. The increased demand for housing was due to an increase in the numbers of middle class workers, members of the military, and professionals.

Around 2000, the city expansion westward slowed. There was an expansion of middle-class neighborhoods such as Merliot, Santa Elena and the Tier, but internal migration and the cessation of armed conflict created a high demand for urban public housing. This gave rise to large urban development projects mostly in the east and north, to the phenomenon of "bedroom communities", and to a disorderly growth pattern.

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San Salvador, El Salvador 
<b>San Salvador, El Salvador</b>
Image: IAmCrisWTF513

San Salvador is rated Beta − by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network (GaWC) which evaluates and ranks the relationships between world cities in the context of globalisation. Beta level cities are cities that link moderate economic regions to the world economy.

San Salvador has a population of over 282,000 people. San Salvador also forms the centre of the wider San Salvador metropolitan area which has a population of over 2,404,097 people. San Salvador is ranked #800 for startups with a score of 0.175.

To set up a UBI Lab for San Salvador see: https://www.ubilabnetwork.org Twitter: https://twitter.com/UBILabNetwork

Twin Towns, Sister Cities San Salvador has links with:

🇦🇩 Andorra la Vella, Andorra 🇻🇪 Caracas, Venezuela 🇪🇸 Coslada, Spain 🇶🇦 Doha, Qatar 🇦🇪 Dubai, UAE 🇲🇽 Guadalajara, Mexico 🇬🇹 Guatemala City, Guatemala 🇨🇦 Laval, Canada 🇵🇹 Lisbon, Portugal 🇺🇸 Los Angeles, USA 🇪🇸 Madrid, Spain 🇳🇮 Managua, Nicaragua 🇺🇸 Miami, USA 🇲🇽 Monterrey, Mexico 🇺🇾 Montevideo, Uruguay 🇨🇦 Montreal, Canada 🇧🇷 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 🇪🇸 Seville, Spain 🇺🇸 Washington D.C., USA
Text Atribution: Wikipedia Text under CC-BY-SA license | GaWC | StartupBlink

Antipodal to San Salvador is: 90.822,-13.697

Locations Near: San Salvador -89.1777,13.6966

🇸🇻 Antiguo Cuscatlán -89.233,13.667 d: 6.9  

🇸🇻 Cojutepeque -88.933,13.717 d: 26.5  

🇸🇻 La Libertad -89.322,13.488 d: 28  

🇸🇻 Zacatecoluca -88.867,13.5 d: 40.1  

🇸🇻 Chalatenango -88.933,14.033 d: 45.8  

🇸🇻 Santa Ana -89.557,13.991 d: 52.5  

🇸🇻 Sonsonate -89.717,13.717 d: 58.3  

🇸🇻 Ahuachapán -89.85,13.917 d: 76.6  

🇸🇻 Ciudad Romero -88.45,13.35 d: 87.6  

🇸🇻 San Miguel -88.183,13.476 d: 110.2  

Antipodal to: San Salvador 90.822,-13.697

🇮🇩 Bengkulu 102.25,-3.783 d: 18345.3  

🇮🇩 Bengkulu City 102.264,-3.792 d: 18344.8  

🇮🇩 Liwa 104.083,-5.033 d: 18271.5  

🇮🇩 Teluk Dalam 97.8,0.55 d: 18254.3  

🇮🇩 Padang 100.355,-0.951 d: 18251.9  

🇮🇩 Padang Panjang 100.429,-0.458 d: 18202.5  

🇮🇩 Sawahlunto 100.777,-0.681 d: 18199.8  

🇮🇩 Pringsewu 104.961,-5.356 d: 18209.8  

🇮🇩 Bukittinggi 100.367,-0.3 d: 18192.1  

🇮🇩 Bandar Lampung 105.267,-5.45 d: 18186.4  

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