Districts of Saint Lucia

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Updates: 

The 2006 Statesman's Yearbook shows provisional population data from the 2001 census. I've used those figures in the main table, replacing the preliminary estimates as of 1999-07-01, which I had found at the Government Statistics Dept.  site.

Country overview: 

Saint Lucia was a British possession until granted independence on 1979-02-22.

Other names of country: 

1. Danish: Saint Lucia
2. Dutch: Sint Lucia, Saint Lucia
3. Finnish: Saint Lucia
4. French: Sainte-Lucie
5. German: Sankt Lucia n
6. Icelandic: Sankti Lúsía
7. Italian: Santa Lucia, Saint Lucia
8. Norwegian: Saint Lucia
9. Portuguese: Santa Lúcia, Santa Luzia
10. Spanish: Santa Lucía
11. Swedish: Saint Lucia

Origin of name: 

after Saint Lucy (3rd cent.)

Primary subdivisions: 

Saint Lucia is divided into ten districts.

Discussion:

Here is some background information on the choices I made in preparing a list of quarters for "Administrative Subdivisions of Countries".

The official term for the divisions seems to be "quartiers". This is a French word, just as are most of the division names. (Saint Lucia was a French colony until 1814.) The English equivalent would be districts or quarters. The FIPS and ISO standards call them quarters. Recent census reports call them "districts/parishes".

Some U.S. government sources show a slightly different subdivision of St. Lucia. They list the districts as Anse-la-Raye, Castries, Choiseul, Dauphin, Dennery, Gros Islet, Laborie, Micoud, Praslin, Soufrière, and Vieux Fort (eleven divisions instead of ten). This list appears in FIPS PUB 10-4 and its predecessors back at least as far as 1984. It has appeared in the CIA World Factbook since 1989 or earlier. It matches the divisions shown on the CIA map of Saint Lucia.

The list in my main table matches tables of population statistics provided by the Saint Lucia Government Statistics Department, which seem the most official to me. The same list is used in a report issued jointly by Saint Lucia and the Organization of American States (OAS). The Statesman's Year-Book (1997-1998 edition) says "there are 10 administrative districts", and more recently, the 2006 edition actually has the same list as above. The Encyclopædia Britannica World Atlas (1964 edition) says Saint Lucia is "divided into 9 quarters and the town of Castries", which fits in with the rest of the evidence.

The OAS Map  shows the same divisions that I'm reporting. The CIA Map  shows the U.S. government version. If you compare the extents of the divisions on the two maps, you find the following approximate equivalences: Gros Islet in the OAS version is Gros Islet and Dauphin in the CIA version; Anse-la-Raye and Canaries correspond to Anse-la-Raye; and Micoud corresponds to Micoud and Praslin. Perhaps there was a reorganization at some time: one version may have been succeeded by the other. I don't have enough evidence to say that this really happened, nor which version was first.

ISO/DIS 3166-2 (draft international standard), dated 1996, showed Saint Lucia divided into eight "administrative regions". ISO 3166-2:1998 was published on 1998-12-15. It said only that there were eleven quarters, without mentioning their names; these divisions were "not relevant". ISO 3166-2:2007 was published on 2007-12-15. It lists eleven quarters, giving the same names as the U.S. government version (with the minor variation that Anse la Raye has spaces rather than hyphens).

Territorial extent: 

Vieux Fort includes the small Maria Islands.