Definition
Solares (singular: solar) is a term from Spanish colonial land law referring to town lots or parcels of ground, typically urban or settlement plots assigned to individuals within a Spanish colonial grant. The term appears most commonly in the context of Spanish crown grants of land in the Americas, where parcels were distributed to settlers as designated building or residential lots within a planned town or settlement.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with Spanish land grants in territories that were once under Spanish colonial jurisdiction — including present-day Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, and Louisiana — will encounter solares in original grant documents, survey records, and subsequent litigation over title. These grants did not disappear upon American acquisition of those territories; under the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848, and related instruments, the United States generally recognized valid Spanish and Mexican land grants, and American courts repeatedly had to interpret the original grant language, including terms like solares.
The critical research trap is treating solares as equivalent to any ordinary land measurement or generic parcel description. Solares referred specifically to town lots within a settlement layout — as distinct from labores (agricultural tracts) or estancias (ranching grants). Confusing these categories in grant documents can lead to misreading the nature, size, and use-rights of the land conveyed. Spanish colonial settlement law prescribed different dimensions and purposes for each category.
Historical sources are thin on precise dimensional standards for solares, which varied by colonial period, region, and the specific terms of a given grant. A researcher relying solely on Bouvier's sparse entry will find almost nothing useful for reconstructing what a solar actually looked like on the ground. The reference to White's Recopilación points toward the more substantive authority: White's New Recopilation of the Laws of the Indies and other Spanish and Mexican law compilations are the primary sources for understanding how solares were defined, assigned, and measured within the colonial grant system. Volume 2 of that compilation addresses the structure of colonial land distributions.
American courts adjudicating Spanish grant title disputes in the nineteenth century treated the original Spanish law as controlling for interpreting grant terms, meaning a researcher tracing title in former Spanish territories needs access to both the colonial grant documents and the Spanish legal framework that gave those terms their meaning.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's treatment is minimal — two sentences directing the researcher to White's Recopilación. This is characteristic of Bouvier's approach to Spanish colonial terms: he identifies and locates them without elaborating on their legal content, since the operative law was Spanish rather than Anglo-American. No other standard Anglo-American historical legal dictionary treats solares with any depth. The term does not appear in Black's early editions or in Burrill's Law Dictionary, reflecting the limited penetration of Spanish land law concepts into the mainstream Anglo-American legal vocabulary.
The absence of elaboration in historical dictionaries is itself informative: solares was not a term of art in American common law but rather a foreign-law term that American courts had to receive and apply in specific geographic and historical contexts. Researchers should not expect doctrinal development around the term in the Anglo-American tradition; its content is found in Spanish colonial sources, not in American case law or treatises.
Jurisdictional Note
Solares as a legal term of consequence is effectively confined to jurisdictions with Spanish colonial land grant histories — principally the American Southwest, Florida, and Louisiana. Its relevance to modern title questions depends entirely on whether a chain of title traces back to a Spanish crown or colonial government grant that used the term.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Land Grants (Spanish Colonial); Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (Land Rights).