El Salvador
San Salvador, El Salvador · San Salvador · the Maya ruins
5 places pinned — click any one for its story.
The place
El Salvador is the smallest and most densely populated country in Central America — the "Land of Volcanoes," a Pacific coast of surf beaches and coffee-covered highlands with a deep history. The Maya farmed and built here for millennia (Joya de Cerén, Tazumal), the Spanish colonized it, and in living memory it endured one of the hemisphere's most wrenching civil wars, from 1979 to 1992.
Katia and I visited in 2008, in the years after the peace accords — the Maya ruins, the volcanoes, the colonial towns, and a country carrying both an ancient past and very recent history. On this trip's page, my photos of these places sit beside the black-and-white images of the war years, then and now.
Places I visited
History & facts for each spot — with a “then & now” archival photo where one exists. Every one has its own page; open it for the full write-up and all the photos.
The capital, ringed by volcanoes and rebuilt many times after earthquakes. Its Metropolitan Cathedral is where Archbishop Óscar Romero — assassinated in 1980 — is buried, and where the funeral massacre helped ignite the civil war.
Full history & photos →Read more on Wikipedia →Archival photo: Laguna Volcan San Salvador — Wikimedia Commons
The 'Pompeii of the Americas' — a Maya farming village buried and perfectly preserved under volcanic ash around 600 AD, down to the food in the pots. El Salvador's first UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Full history & photos →Read more on Wikipedia →
The largest and best-preserved Maya ruins in El Salvador, at Chalchuapa — a stepped pyramid complex occupied for well over a thousand years.
Full history & photos →Read more on Wikipedia →
A cobblestoned colonial town above Lake Suchitlán, at the heart of the country's coffee culture — and hard-hit during the civil war, now a peaceful arts town.
Full history & photos →Read more on Wikipedia →From 1979 to 1992 a brutal civil war between the U.S.-backed military government and the FMLN guerrillas killed some 75,000 people. Its images — the murdered Romero, the refugees, the mountain fighters — defined a generation of photojournalism.
Full history & photos →Read more on Wikipedia →