Ciales is a town and municipality of Puerto Rico, located on the Central Mountain Range, northwest of Orocovis; south of Florida and Manatí; east of Utuado and Jayuya; and west of Morovis. Ciales is spread over eight barrios and Ciales Pueblo (the downtown area and the administrative center of the city). It is part of the San Juan-Caguas-Guaynabo Metropolitan Statistical Area.
Sources diverge on the origin of the Ciales name. Nineteenth-century historian Cayetano Coll y Toste stated that it was named as such by then-governor Gonzalo de Aróstegui Herrera in honor of General Luis de Lacy, who had gone against Ferdinand VII's absolutist wishes. Coll y Toste suggested that the Villa Lacy name came from the anagram "es-la-cy" anagram.
Other sources, such as Manuel Álvarez Nazario and Luis Hernández Aquino, put forward the theory that it comes from the plural of cibales, plural form of ciba, meaning "stony place" or "place of stones" in Taíno, which "had undergone loss of the intervocalic -b- and the addition of the Spanish suffix referring to place -al." Lisa Cathleen Green-Douglass, who carried out a study of toponymics in Puerto Rico and compared both theories, believed the latter to be most plausible since Coll y Toste, per Green-Douglass, must have defined an anagram as a reversal of syllables and the resulting "Cial" or "Cyal" would have to then be made plural.
Yet others believe it originates from the Spanish sillar (meaning "carved stones") in reference to the stones carved by the Río Grande de Manatí's currents.
