Giveaways
FROM FLORES, in Guatemala, I flew to the airport outside San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, the smallest country in the Americas. El Salvador, meaning ‘The Saviour’, has a population of 6.5 million, which makes it quite densely populated.
Like its neighbours, El Salvador used to be part of the old Federal Republic of Central America, until that federation broke up at the start of the 1840s. Its principal national hero from that era is Captain General Gerardo Barrios, not to be confused with the Guatemalan ruler of the same surname.
Once I got to San Salvador, the first thing I did was to do a Guru Walk. That is a walk organised via a platform where you do free walks and donate money to the guides who show you the sights and landmarks.
The main town square in San Salvador is named after Captain General Barrios and has a statue of him, on horseback.
The Barrios Square is bordered by the National Palace and a new library of seven or eight storeys in height, built with the aid of China.
Another square nearby is called Plaza de La Libertad. It commemorates the outbreak of the struggle for Central American independence from Spain, in San Salvador, on the 5th of November 1811: the so-called ‘first cry for independence’. In the middle of the Plaza is the Heroes’ Monument, erected on the centenary of the first cry, in 1911.
On the east side of the Plaza de la Libertad is the modern Iglesia de El Rosario (Church of the Rosary), whose stained-glass windows produce a rainbow effect inside.
I decided that I would explore San Salvador for a bit, and then investigate the Santa Ana region to the west.
There, I would see the city of Santa Ana, a mountain town called Juayúa, the Santa Ana Volcano, and the beautiful crater lake of Lake Coatepeque.
El Salvador is on the edge of the Caribbean tectonic plate, the Cocos plate subducting just offshore. So, it has a string of volcanoes, many of them periodically active. Even the capital, San Salvador, is built against the flanks of the San Salvador volcano, which towers over the city and is by no means extinct, having last erupted in 1917.
Along with susceptibility to volcanic eruptions, and to tropical hurricanes and mudslides, El Salvador also suffers from frequent earthquakes. Toward the end of a video I made in San Salvador, you can hear a Guru Walk guide explaining how the capital has to be rebuilt, at least partially, about three times in every century. Most recently, San Salvador was hit by a serious earthquake in 1965, in which 125 people were killed, and an even bigger one, in which more than a thousand were killed, in 1986.
A website called Reliefweb lists 57 disasters that hit the country since 1982 alone.
On a more cheerful note, the scenic mountain road that runs north-south through Salcoatitán, just to the west of Juayúa, is known as the Ruta de las Flores, the route of the flowers: a route which includes Juayúa in practice, even though taking in Juayúa involves a slight detour.
The Ruta de las Flores is supposed to be at its best between November and February when most of the flowers are blooming, though I still saw quite a few at the end of March.
There are also several waterfalls that you can hike to on the Ruta de las Flores. There is a trail that runs between some of them, like beads on a necklace.
The Santa Ana Volcano, east of Juayúa, is one of the symbols of El Salvador. It is the most prominent volcano in the Cordillera de Apaneca range of volcanic cones, which is featured in the coat of arms of the old, ill-fated, Federal Republic of Central America.
The cones of the Cordillera are represented as five in number in the coat of arms of the Federal Republic, to symbolise its five founding states: Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. This coat of arms also includes the red cap of freedom — the Phrygian cap, seen in the coat of arms of Cuba as well— with sun-rays bursting forth from it, plus a rainbow, which is another symbol of liberty. All these emblems are inside a golden triangle, which symbolises equality.
The coat of arms of modern El Salvador is very similar. It also includes a version of the old Federal Republic motto of Dios, Unión y Libertad (‘God, Union and Liberty’) as well as the joint independence date of the five original states of the Federal Republic.
The coat of arms of Nicaragua contains the same triangle and its contents in nearly identical form, while the Honduran flag contains five stars, symbolising the five states and the hope, once again, that they will reunite.
As I mentioned in one of my Guatemala posts, the inhabitants of the nations of Central America often carry a bit of a torch for their old union, feeling that they have a lot in common and that they have been subjected to generations of divide-and-rule by powerful outside influences and thereby reduced to ‘banana republics’.
The insult is more subtle in Kipling’s description of the pieces of the former union as the ‘just republics’: pirate havens where fugitives from other countries may live unmolested, Shawshank Redemption style, as long as they have money to spend —
God bless the friendly islands
here warrants never come,
God bless the just republics
That give a man a home.
Although having said that, despite a mixture of bad press and actual problems in their present condition, the five republics haven’t got back together as yet.
In addition to its symbolic mountain range, another thing that the Santa Ana region is famous for is the Tazumal archaeological site, another of the many Mayan pyramid complexes of Central America and southern Mexico.
After visiting that part of the country, I also planned to visit the waterfalls at La Tamanique, closer to San Salvador than the ones on the Ruta de Las Flores.
And to take in some of the beaches on the coast, which is on the Pacific and mostly runs from northwest to southeast. The main ones I was going to spend time at were Playa Costa del Sol and — closer to San Salvador — Playa El Tunco, which means ‘Pig Beach’ in a local idiom.
Altogether, there is a lot you can see in a fairly small area, just half of a fairly small country (I might do the eastern half next time).
It is ironic that with all the noble sentiments of liberty and equality with which countries like El Salvador were founded, their inhabitants have often not enjoyed very much of either.
Like Guatemala, El Salvador suffered a lengthy civil war in recent times, from 1979 to 1992. The war was essentially similar, namely, a somewhat one-sided conflict in which landless peasants seeking land were being subjected to severe repression and massacres.
In San Salvador’s main cathedral, the Metropolitan Cathedral of the Holy Saviour, there were portraits and an effigy of San Salvador’s outspoken Archbishop Óscar Romero, who was assassinated in 1980 while celebrating mass, a deeply shocking act in such a devoutly Catholic country. In 2018, Romero was canonised, that is to say, declared to be a saint, by Pope Francis.
Officially, it is not known who killed him, but the assassins are widely believed to have been members of a right-wing death squad. Some of the mourners at his funeral, believed to be between 30 and 50 in number, were killed by gunshots and by trampling as the crowd sought to flee.
These days, El Salvador’s international airport, a little over 40 km to the southeast of the capital, is named after Óscar Romero (Aeropuerto Internacional de El Salvador San Óscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdámez).
A degree of repressiveness continues, although these days, instead of standing a good chance of being murdered by shadowy political forces, the Salvadorean is merely at risk, these days, of being thrown into prison without much in the way of due process.
After coming to power in 2019, President Nayib Bukele, whose name comes from the fact that his family is of Palestinian origin though resident in El Salvador for at least two generations, ordered a crackdown on gangs, whose behaviour had grown rampant because of the drug trade and, mostly probably also, the traumas and disruption of the civil war.
In 2019, there were 38 homicides per 100,000 people in El Salvador. Partly as a result of the past civil war, more than a million Salvadoreans live in the United States.
Another factor driving emigration is drought. In the tropics, the prevailing winds blow from the east. This creates wet east coasts, while regions further west tend to be dryer. The whole of El Salvador is in a dry area called the Central American Dry Corridor, and the droughts have been getting worse in recent years.
Indeed, to this day, the economy of El Salvador depends quite a lot on remittances from the USA.
Unfortunately, many Salvadoreans in the USA have joined gangs. Some were then deported back to El Salvador after the civil war ended in 1992, bringing the gang lifestyle with them. Perhaps the best-known of these gangs is the one known as MS-13.
Under a policy he called the Territorial Control Plan, initiated in 2020, Bukele has had nearly 80,000 people thought to have gang affiliations rounded up and placed in long-term detention — more than one per cent of the population —with the result that the homicide rate had fallen to 2.4 per 100,000 people in 2023. As one might suspect, this policy was quite popular, though few defenders of civil rights would view it as a long-term solution.
Even more controversially, when it looked as though lawmakers might not vote for his Territorial Control Plan, Bukele ordered 40 soldiers into the debating chamber to persuade them otherwise.
When I was on the road with an American guy named Rick, we met a man who said he had been locked up for five days in one of Bukele’s detention centres after his ex-wife had accused him of beating her. He said that he ended up standing in shit up to his knees.
Before letting him go, so he said, the military summarily decided that all of his wages should henceforth go to his ex-wife and child for a time and that if he didn’t feel like paying this fine, he could stay longer.
On the other hand, just having too many tattoos was the sort of thing that could get you classified as a wrong’un and thrown inside; plus, you could be there for two years as of right before having your case come up for review. At least one NGO is busy helping to get thousands of innocents caught up in Bukele’s crackdowns out of jail, and I read of another successful appeal as well, about the father of a soccer player who was rounded up and then let go again.
Another unusual initiative of Bukele’s was to make Bitcoin legal tender, alongside the US dollar, in 2021. El Salvador has not had its own currency since 2001, with the US dollar the only legal tender between that date and 2021.
Travelling around San Salvador, I had a look at a few more churches. Perhaps appropriately, given its name, El Salvador has many famous churches and cathedrals.
One of them is named after the Virgin of Guadulupe, who appeared, so it is said, to a Mexican peasant in 1531, her image implanting itself on his cloak. She also gave him a bouquet of roses, unknown in the recently colonised district at the time and incapable of being transported over a long distance back then, just to prove that she was for real.
As to the image on the cloak, its most likely origins and whether it could have been made by humans have been debated by scientists, as with the Shroud of Turin, ever since. Still, there is a saying that you are not a real Mexican if you do not believe in the Virgin of Guadalupe. And she has a following in Central America as well.
Another church I took a photo of was called El Calvario.
One of my Guru guides showed me a photo of how it had looked decades ago. It looked as though the whole place was a lot more run down then, probably because it was not yet getting as many tourists (probably none, if it was taken during the civil war).
Here is some contemporary street art, of the kind that they probably also did not have forty years ago.
The little bird at the top right is, I think, the national bird of El Salvador, which I did manage to see. It is far more colourful in real life, and bears at least four names: the torogoz in El Salvador, the guaradabarranco in Nicaragua (where it is also the national bird), the turquoise-browed motmot among English-speakers, and in the world of science, Eumomota superciliosa.
I had thought, at first, that the following photo of a torogoz was of a male in breeding plumage.
With most sorts of birds, the males are more conspicuous than the females, and sometimes grow long trailing feathers for added decoration in the breeding season as well, the better to impress the females, even though it increases their risk of being spotted and eaten by some predator. The ‘hen’, who contains the eggs until they are laid, is usually the better camouflaged of the two. However, I learned that torogozes are more equal. Both sexes look spectacular, and both have the ‘paddles’ that hang from the tail.
I only stayed for one night in San Salvador, but the hostel where I stayed, La Zona, had the best breakfast going! And then I hit the road to Santa Ana, where I stayed for three nights at a place called Rick’s Hostel. It only cost $5 for a bed at Rick’s Hostel. This was in a dorm with ten people but it was great all the same.
You come across lots of information in hostels, whereas in a private Airbnb it is hard to find things out, especially as I don’t speak Spanish.
It was in San Salvador that I met Rick, the guy from New Jersey. The two of us hooked up to travel from San Salvador to Santa Ana. We got the chicken bus: that is to say, the cheap one used by locals who sometimes bring chickens on board.
There are three different bus depots in San Salvador. You need to know exactly which one your bus goes from and where that depot is. To go between them, it is best to take an Uber.
Next: adventures in the western part of the country, and then on down to the beaches — plus waterfalls!
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