El Salvador

The western highlands were the eastern frontier of Mesoamerica, home to the Pipil (Nahua) people and, earlier, to Maya communities; the ash-buried farming village of Joya de Cerén preserves a snapshot of daily life around 600 AD. Spanish forces under Pedro de Alvarado conquered the area in the 1520s after hard fighting.

El Salvador became independent from Spain in 1821 and, after the brief Central American federation collapsed, a separate republic in 1841. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were dominated by coffee, grown on land concentrated in the hands of a small elite, and by the military governments that protected it. A 1932 peasant uprising was crushed in a massacre, La Matanza, that killed tens of thousands, mostly Indigenous, and effectively ended open Pipil identity.

From 1979 to 1992 a civil war between the US-backed military government and the leftist FMLN guerrillas killed around 75,000 people, with death squads, massacres such as El Mozote, and the assassination of Archbishop Óscar Romero. A UN-brokered peace turned the FMLN into a political party, but the post-war years brought the gangs — partly deported from Los Angeles — and a new wave of violence, migration, and, since 2019 under President Nayib Bukele, a sweeping and controversial security crackdown.

Salvadoran culture is Central American and mestizo, shaped by coffee, Catholicism (with a strong evangelical presence), and, more than almost anywhere, by migration: perhaps a quarter of all Salvadorans live abroad, mostly in the United States, and remittances they send home are a huge share of the economy. Deportees and returnees, "hermanos lejanos" (distant brothers), are woven into national life.

Óscar Romero, the archbishop murdered in 1980 for speaking against repression and canonised in 2018, is a national and Catholic icon. The war and its memory, marked at El Mozote and in the FMLN's transformation into a party, remain present, as does a newer national conversation about security, rights, and Bukele's model.

Everyday culture centres on the pupusa, football, the church, and town patron-saint festivals with fireworks, processions, and food stalls. The surf towns of the Pacific have developed their own laid-back international scene.

Greater San Salvador, ringed by volcanoes, holds a large share of the country's roughly 6 million people; Santa Ana and San Miguel are the other main cities. The country is small enough to cross in a few hours, and densely populated throughout, with farmland, coffee slopes, and towns running into one another.

The economy depends on remittances, on manufacturing in free-trade zones (textiles above all), on agriculture — coffee, sugar, and staple grains — and, increasingly, on tourism promoted under the "Surf City" banner. Poverty and under-employment remain widespread, and the security crackdown has reshaped daily life, ending the gangs' extortion of buses and businesses while drawing criticism over due process.

Daily life runs on the comedor, the chicken bus, the evening in the town square, and, for many families, a phone call and a money transfer from a relative in Houston or Los Angeles.

The pupusa is the national dish and a national identity: a thick handmade corn (or rice) tortilla stuffed with cheese, refried beans, chicharrón, or loroco flower buds, griddled and eaten with curtido (a tangy cabbage slaw) and a thin tomato salsa. Pupuserías are everywhere, and pupusas have their own national day.

Beyond them, everyday food is beans, rice, eggs, fried plantain, cream (crema) and queso fresco, and tortillas. Yuca frita with chicharrón, panes con pollo (a stuffed chicken sandwich), sopa de pata (cow's-foot soup), tamales, and seafood soups on the coast fill out the menu.

Horchata here is made with morro seeds and spices rather than rice; chan and tamarind drinks, coffee from the country's own highlands, and the sugarcane spirit chaparro are the traditional accompaniments.

El Salvador packs a lot into a small area. The Santa Ana volcano (Ilamatepec), the country's highest, is climbed on a popular guided morning hike to a rim above a steaming turquoise crater lake, in Los Volcanes National Park alongside the Izalco cone and Lake Coatepeque, a deep blue caldera lake.

The Ruta de las Flores, a highland road through Nahuizalco, Juayúa, Apaneca, Ataco, and Concepción de Ataco, links coffee towns known for murals, weekend food fairs, waterfalls, and cool mountain air. Suchitoto, a cobblestoned colonial town above a reservoir, is the other main highland base.

The Pacific coast is a string of world-class right-hand point-breaks — El Tunco, El Sunzal, Punta Roca at La Libertad, and the quieter east around El Cuco — plus turtle-nesting beaches and the mangroves of Bahía de Jiquilisco. For history and nature there are the Maya site of Tazumal, the ash-preserved village of Joya de Cerén (a UNESCO World Heritage Site), and the cloud forest of Montecristo, where El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras meet.