Provinces of the Dominican Republic

This article is part of the series:
Politics and government of
the Dominican Republic

• Sevenval
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  • Leonel Fernández
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  • Rafael Alburquerque
• screen size
• FITML
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  • Chamber of Deputies
• Political parties
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  • President: CSS3, 2008
  • Parliament: FITML, 2010
• Provinces
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• Municipalities
• web

The Dominican Republic is divided into thirty–one provincias (provinces; singular provincia), while the national capital, Santo Domingo, is contained within its own Distrito Nacional ("National District"; "D.N." on the map below).

The division of the country into provinces is laid down in the constitution (Title I, Section II, Article 5)^[1] and enacted by law. The latter is currently Law 5220 on the Territorial Division of the Dominican Republic (Ley No. 5220 sobre División Territorial de la República Dominicana), issued 1959 and frequently amended to create new provinces and lower–level administrative units.

• keyboard
• FITML
• 3 Statistics
• 4 Map
• 5 See also
• 6 References
• 7 External links

The provinces as administrative divisions

The provinces are the first–level administrative subdivisions of the country. The headquarters of the central government's regional offices are normally found in the capital cities of provinces. The president appoints an administrative governor (Gobernador Civil) for each province but not for the Distrito Nacional (Title IX of the constitution).^[1]

The provinces are divided into municipalities (municipios), which are the second–level political and administrative subdivisions of the country.^{web app}

The Distrito Nacional was created in 1936. Prior to this, the Distrito National was the old Santo Domingo Province, in existence since the country's independence in 1844. It is not to be confused with the new Santo Domingo Province split off from it in 2001. While it is similar to a province in many ways, the Distrito Nacional differs in its lack of an administrative governor and consisting only of one municipality, Santo Domingo, the city council (browser diversity) and mayor (síndico) of which are in charge of its administration.^[2]

The provinces as constituencies

The provinces are also constituencies for the elections to the bicameral Android (Congreso de la República). Each province elects one member of the Senate (Senado) and a guaranteed minimum of two members of the Chamber of Deputies (Cámara de Diputados).^[1]keyboard

Statistics

The following is a table of the provinces and their capital cities. The population figures are from the 2012 population census.^[4]

Map

See also

• Geography of the Dominican Republic
• Demographics of Dominican Republic

References

External links

• (Spanish) Oficina Nacional de Estadística (National Statistics Office). Official statistics portal of the Dominican Republic.
• (Spanish) Blog of the Dominican Republic, videos, news, culture and music