Nicaragua

León and Granada, founded by the Spanish as rival cities — one liberal, one conservative — set the pattern for three centuries of Nicaraguan politics. Independence came in 1821 within a short-lived Central American federation, and Nicaragua stood alone from 1838. The transit route across Lake Nicaragua and the San Juan River made the country a strategic prize, and in 1856 the American adventurer William Walker briefly seized the presidency before being driven out.

The United States landed Marines in Nicaragua on and off from 1912 to 1933, fought the guerrillas of Augusto César Sandino, and left behind a US-trained National Guard. Its commander, Anastasio Somoza García, had Sandino killed and took power in 1937, founding a family dictatorship that lasted more than forty years. The Somozas' theft of relief aid after the 1972 Managua earthquake broke what was left of their support, and in July 1979 the Sandinista Front, named for Sandino, overthrew the last of them.

The Sandinista government ran a mass literacy campaign and land reform, but also censorship and a draft, and the United States armed the "Contra" rebels against it in a war that killed some 30,000 people and ruined the economy. Daniel Ortega lost the 1990 election to Violeta Chamorro, then returned to the presidency by ballot in 2006. Since around 2016 Nicaragua has slid back into dictatorship: the 2018 protests were put down with lethal force, opposition candidates were jailed before the 2021 vote, hundreds have been stripped of citizenship and expelled, and Ortega and his wife Rosario Murillo now rule as "co-presidents".

Nicaragua has two cultural worlds. The Pacific side is Spanish-Catholic and mestizo; the Caribbean coast is Afro-Caribbean and Indigenous, with Creole, Miskito, and Garifuna communities and their own music, food, and Maypole festivals. Poetry is a national point of pride — Rubén Darío, born here, founded the Modernismo movement and is revered — and the satirical colonial masked drama El Güegüense is on UNESCO's heritage list.

Baseball, not football, is the national sport, a legacy of the US presence, and Nicaragua sends players to the major leagues. Religion is central to public life, never more visibly than at the Purísima and the Gritería in early December, when families build altars to the Virgin and neighbours go door to door singing for sweets — though the Catholic Church, long a moral authority, is now a target of the state, with bishops and priests jailed or exiled.

Town fiestas bring marimba music, folk dances, and hípica horse parades, and the Caribbean coast adds the drums and dancing of Palo de Mayo.

Around 6.7 million people live in Nicaragua, most on the hot Pacific plain and in the cooler northern coffee highlands; low-slung Managua, never fully rebuilt after 1972, holds about a fifth of them. The Caribbean half of the country — two autonomous regions of rainforest, rivers, and mining towns — is far poorer and less connected.

Nicaragua is the second-poorest country in the Americas. The economy runs on coffee, beef, gold, sugar, tobacco, and garment assembly, and increasingly on the money sent home by the very large numbers who have emigrated since 2018 to the United States, Costa Rica, and Spain; remittances are now around a quarter of the economy.

Political fear shapes ordinary life. With independent media, NGOs, universities, and many church institutions shut or seized, people are guarded about what they say and to whom, and civil society as it existed before 2018 has largely disappeared.

The base is maize, beans, rice, and plantain. Gallo pinto, rice and beans fried together, is eaten at nearly every meal, often with cuajada cheese, egg, and a tortilla. The Sunday dish is the nacatamal, a big banana-leaf parcel of maize dough with pork, rice, potato, and vegetables.

Street classics include vigorón (cassava, pork crackling, and cabbage salad on a leaf) and quesillo (soft cheese and pickled onion rolled in a tortilla with cream), while indio viejo, baho, and tripe soup are the hearty stews. On the Caribbean coast the cooking turns to coconut, in the seafood stew rondón and in coconut bread and rice.

To drink there are the toasted-maize and cacao drinks pinolillo and tiste — Nicaraguans call themselves pinoleros — along with fresh fruit frescos, Flor de Caña rum, and Toña and Victoria beers.

Granada, on Lake Nicaragua, is the showpiece: a low, colourful colonial city of courtyard houses and churches beneath the Mombacho volcano, with boat trips through the tiny islands of Las Isletas. León, its old rival, has the largest cathedral in Central America, revolutionary murals, and volcano-boarding down the black cinder slope of Cerro Negro. At Masaya, near Managua, a road runs to the crater rim above a glowing lava lake.

Ometepe, an island of two volcanoes rising from Lake Nicaragua — cloud-forested Maderas and near-symmetrical Concepción — is the country's signature landscape, with pre-Columbian petroglyphs and quiet farm roads. The Pacific coast has the surf and sunsets of San Juan del Sur, and the Corn Islands in the Caribbean offer reefs and an easy Creole pace.

The Río San Juan and the tiny Solentiname archipelago, home to a school of "primitivist" painters, reach into the wettest, wildest south, while the northern highlands around Matagalpa, Jinotega, and Estelí are coffee, cigars, and cloud forest.