"font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US">On January 25, 1861, General
Juan José Nieto Gil, president of the
State of Bolívar, launched a rebellion from Barranquilla. Barranquilla became
the capital of a province of the same name by law on December 26, 1862, and the
Sovereign State of Bolívar was divided into 12 provinces. At the establishment
of the United States of Colombia, the growing commercial importance of
Barranquilla led to the construction, between 1869 and 1871, of the
Bolívar Railway
(
Ferrocarril de Bolívar), the first railway of the present-day
Republic of Colombia. It linked Barranquilla and Sabanilla (Salgar), the latter
being the location of the customs house. Due to the shallowness of the waters,
it was necessary to extend the railway to
Puerto
Cupino, where the Cuban engineer Francisco Javier Cisneros built what was then
one of the longest piers in the world, second only to the one in
South end-on-Sea, England.
In 1872, an epidemic with symptoms
similar to those of cholera became manifest in the city. In 1876, an enormous amount of
contraband entered the city from Salgar. In
the last decades of the 19th century, Barranquilla experienced a series of
advances represented by the founding of the Society of the Aqueduct in 1877,
commissioning in 1884 of a mule-pulled tram, the
