The tarea: a real unit, but not an official one

Why this page reads differently from the others

The manzana and the vara have one clean, universally agreed definition: 10,000 square varas to a manzana, full stop. The tarea doesn't have that. We're publishing this page anyway, because tarea is genuinely used to describe land in parts of El Salvador. But we think you deserve to know it's a common-practice figure, not an official one, and to understand why that distinction matters before you rely on it.

Not in the official registry

El Salvador's central bank statistics office (BCR/ONEC) publishes an official catalog of the country's units of measure. Vara, square vara and manzana are all listed in it. Tarea is not. That doesn't mean tarea isn't real. It means there's no single government-stamped figure for it, the way there is for a manzana.

Where you'll actually hear it

Tarea shows up most in agricultural, everyday speech, the way people describe land at the kitchen table, not the way a notary writes it into a deed. It's especially common in el oriente, the eastern departments, where it's still how a lot of families talk about how much land they have or are selling.

The 1/16-manzana rule

The figure most people use, and the one our calculator uses, comes from a simple everyday rule: a manzana divides into 16 tareas. 6,988.96 m² ÷ 16 works out to 436.81 m², close enough to the 437 m² usually quoted that the difference is just rounding.

That rule is consistent across multiple independent everyday sources we checked, which is reassuring for a unit with no official standard. But "consistent among the sources we found" is a different, weaker claim than "defined by law," and we want to be upfront about that difference.

A different "tarea" elsewhere

If you search "tarea" in Spanish, you'll also find a completely different definition: about 628.86 m², based on a unit called the cuerda, common in the Dominican Republic and parts of the Caribbean. That's not the same unit as the Salvadoran tarea, even though the word is identical. If a source you're reading gives you a tarea figure that's not close to 437 m², it's very likely talking about a different country's tarea, not El Salvador's.

Quick conversion table