El Salvador

El Salvador is the smallest country on the American mainland — 21,041 km², about a quarter of Czechia — and the only one in Central America with no Caribbean coast. Into that it packs about twenty volcanoes, several crater lakes, 307 km of Pacific surf including a genuinely world-class point break, cloud forest on three borders, and a Maya farming village preserved under volcanic ash since the year 600.

For a long time nobody came here. Between the civil war of the 1980s and the gang violence that followed it, El Salvador spent four decades as the country travellers skipped between Guatemala and Nicaragua. That has changed, dramatically and controversially, and it is now the central fact about visiting: since the state of exception declared in March 2022, the homicide rate has fallen from among the highest in the world to among the lowest in the Americas — and more than 85,000 people have been detained, most without trial, in a suspension of due process that human rights organisations across the political spectrum have documented in detail.

That is genuinely both things at once, and this page says so in the safety section rather than picking the half that makes for a simpler story. For a visitor, the practical effect is that El Salvador is now easy and pleasant to travel in a way it has not been in living memory.

What it is good for: surfing, volcano hiking, coffee, colonial towns, and food. What it is not: beach resorts, big archaeology, or a country you need two weeks for. Five to seven days does it properly, and it combines naturally with Guatemala and Honduras — the land borders are an hour or two away.

The country is named for Jesus Christ: Pedro de Alvarado's 1525 settlement was called Villa de San Salvador, the Holy Saviour. The full name, República de El Salvador, keeps the article — it is El Salvador, not Salvador, and the distinction matters to Salvadorans.

Two mountain ranges run east-west across a country you can drive across in four hours. The southern one is the volcanic chain — the reason the soil is fertile, the reason the coffee is good, and the reason the country has been flattened repeatedly by earthquakes. Between the ranges lies the central plateau where most Salvadorans live; south of the volcanoes, a narrow coastal plain and the Pacific.

San Salvador sits in the middle, an hour from the Pacific and 90 minutes from the Guatemalan border. Nothing in the country is more than about four hours from anything else, which makes a single base entirely viable.

Getting around: the chicken buses — repainted American school buses — are cheap, frequent, slow and an experience. Shuttles between tourist towns cost more and save hours. Uber works in San Salvador and Santa Ana and is cheap. Renting a car is genuinely easy now and roads are in decent shape.

The land was Nahua-Pipil, Lenca and Maya at the conquest, organised around the polity of Cuscatlán. Pedro de Alvarado invaded in 1524, was wounded and driven back, and returned; Spanish control took years rather than weeks. Colonial El Salvador was poor and peripheral, producing indigo for export and not much else.

Independence in 1821 changed the owners, not the structure. What transformed the country was coffee: from the 1870s the state abolished communal indigenous landholding by decree, transferred the volcanic uplands to private hands, and built an export economy on a crop that needs land and cheap labour. The result was one of the most concentrated landholding patterns in the world, and the oligarchy that Salvadorans call las catorce familias — the fourteen families — whether or not the number was ever exact.

In January 1932, after a collapse in coffee prices, a peasant and indigenous uprising broke out in the west, led in part by the communist Farabundo Martí. It was suppressed within days. The reprisals — La Matanza — killed somewhere between ten thousand and forty thousand people, disproportionately indigenous, and effectively erased visible indigenous identity from the country. Martí was executed; forty-eight years later the guerrilla front that fought the civil war took his name.

Between 1980 and 1992 El Salvador fought a civil war that killed around 75,000 people in a country of five million. On one side the army and the state, heavily funded by the United States; on the other the FMLN, a coalition of five guerrilla organisations. Most of the dead were civilians, and the UN Truth Commission attributed the large majority of documented violations to state forces and allied death squads.

No account of El Salvador written after 2022 can avoid this, and most accounts pick a side. Here are the things that are not in dispute.

Nayib Bukele became president in 2019 at 37, having been mayor of San Salvador for a party he was expelled from. In March 2022, after a weekend in which 87 people were murdered, his government declared a state of exception suspending several constitutional protections — the right to be informed of the reason for arrest, access to a lawyer, and limits on pre-trial detention. It has been renewed monthly ever since.

A metropolitan area of about 1.8 million in a bowl beneath the San Salvador volcano, rebuilt repeatedly after earthquakes and consequently short on old buildings. It is not a beautiful city and it does not pretend to be, but it has the museums, the food and the history, and two days here anchor the trip.

Ninety minutes north of the capital, on a hill above Lago Suchitlán, and the best-preserved colonial town in El Salvador — cobbles, single-storey adobe houses, a whitewashed church, and a large artistic and expatriate community that arrived after the war and stayed.

A 36 km stretch of road through the western coffee highlands linking five small towns — Nahuizalco, Salcoatitán, Juayúa, Apaneca and Ataco — at around 1,200–1,500 m, cool, green, and named for the coffee blossom that covers the hills between October and February. It is the most straightforwardly enjoyable thing in El Salvador.

El Salvador's only World Heritage site, inscribed in 1993, and one of the most important archaeological sites in the Americas — not because of what was built there, but because of what was left behind. Around 600 CE the Loma Caldera vent erupted and buried a small Maya farming village under fourteen layers of ash, sealing it within hours.

El Salvador sits at the southern edge of the Maya world and its sites are modest by the standards of Tikal or Copán — but they are close together, almost empty, and cheap.

El Salvador calls itself the Land of Volcanoes and puts one on the coat of arms. About twenty are considered volcanoes proper and the country has some 170 volcanic structures in total, in a chain running the length of the country parallel to the coast. Several are active; all of them are why anyone lives here, because the ash makes the soil.

The volcanic arc left a string of calderas, and most of them filled with water. They are the country's best swimming, and considerably more pleasant than the Pacific, which has strong surf and a serious rip.

El Salvador's Pacific coast produces long, consistent right-hand point breaks over rock and cobble, working best on the southern hemisphere swell from March to October. It is one of the best surf coasts in the Americas and, until recently, one of the least crowded. The government has invested heavily under the Surf City banner, and the country hosted the World Surfing Games in 2021 and 2023.

El Salvador's beaches are volcanic — dark grey to black sand, warm water, big surf and dramatic sunsets. They are not Caribbean beaches and visitors expecting white sand and calm water will be disappointed. Taken on their own terms they are excellent.

Coffee built modern El Salvador, for better and considerably for worse: it created the export economy, the land concentration that caused the civil war, and — as a side effect — the country's finest agricultural product. Salvadoran coffee is grown high, mostly shade-grown, and heavily weighted towards heirloom varieties that most producing countries replaced decades ago.

Six and a bit million people in a country the size of a Czech region, which makes El Salvador the most densely populated country on the American mainland. Salvadorans are direct, funny and startlingly hospitable to visitors, partly because there have been so few of them for so long that a foreigner is still slightly interesting.

Spanish, spoken in a Central American accent that uses vos rather than tú — ¿vos querés? rather than ¿tú quieres?. It is not slang and it is not incorrect; it is simply what people say, and learners who studied in Spain will need a day to adjust.

English is spoken in the surf towns, in tourism and by returned migrants — of whom there are many, so the accent you hear may well be from Los Angeles. Outside those contexts, basic Spanish is close to essential.

Something like 1.5 to 2 million Salvadorans live in the United States — around a fifth of everyone who holds the nationality — and the money they send home is roughly a quarter of the national economy. Few countries in the world are as shaped by emigration.

El Salvador has one great dish and it is very great indeed. The pupusa — a thick hand-patted corn tortilla stuffed before cooking, griddled, and served with curtido and salsa — is the national food to a degree few countries manage, with its own national day on the second Sunday of November.

Tropical, with two seasons and no meaningful temperature variation through the year — what changes is the rain and the altitude you happen to be standing at. The coast runs 28–33 °C all year; the Ruta de las Flores at 1,300 m runs 18–25 °C and is pleasant every single day.

One international airport: San Salvador (SAL), formally Monseñor Óscar Arnulfo Romero, about 45 minutes south-east of the capital and — conveniently — only 30 minutes from the surf coast. It is a hub for Avianca, which makes connections through it good.

There is no short way. El Salvador is a two-connection trip from Central Europe and a long day and a half door to door, which is one reason it is combined with Guatemala so often.

For thirty years El Salvador was one of the most dangerous countries on Earth outside a war zone. It is not now, and most published advice has not caught up. The Bukele section above covers how and at what cost; this is what it means practically.

Cheaper than Costa Rica or Panama, slightly more expensive than Guatemala or Nicaragua, and dollarised — so there is no exchange-rate game to play and prices are what they say. Figures are per person per day in US dollars.

On 7 September 2021 El Salvador became the first country in the world to make Bitcoin legal tender alongside the US dollar. It was announced by video at a Miami conference, legislated in three days, and remains the most-discussed thing about the country after its security policy.

El Salvador is the most interesting country in Central America to visit right now, and the hardest to write about honestly. Everything a traveller notices is good: the volcanoes are an hour from the capital, the surf is world-class and empty by international standards, the coffee is exceptional, the pupusas cost fifty cents, and Salvadorans are visibly delighted that anyone came at all.

And all of that sits on top of an argument the rest of the world is having about the country in the abstract while Salvadorans have it in their own homes. A great many people can walk their own streets for the first time in their adult lives. A great many other people have a relative in a cell without a trial date. Both of those sentences are true, and a guidebook that prints only one of them is doing propaganda in one direction or the other.

So: go. It is safe, it is cheap, it is beautiful and it is small enough to see properly in a week. Climb Santa Ana, spend two nights on the Ruta de las Flores, eat at the Juayúa feria on a Sunday, stand in the room where Romero was shot, and walk around Joya de Cerén thinking about the fact that someone left their dinner on the table 1,400 years ago and it is still there. Then talk to people, and listen to what they actually say rather than to what you expected.

— Radim Kaufmann