It was a struggle to find any kind of a tour in El Salvador
to get to see some of the country’s sights . Although plenty of tours are
advertised online by agencies, they don’t actually run on a regular basis. You
can make an expensive private booking, though. I did find one company named
Salvadorean Tours which said it had a group tour running on Sunday, a sort of
“Highlights of El Salvador” trip taking in some of the natural and
archaeological sites in the western part of the country. “Sure, sign me up!” I
told them via e-mail despite the $99 price. My guide Miguel arrived to pick me
up in a very nice car fifteen minutes before the assigned time. This “group tour”
turned out to be myself and a Mexican man on business in El Salvador who booked
something to do on a Sunday.

El Salvador is known as “The Land of the Volcanos” and
probably has almost as many in its small area as Guatemala and Nicaragua do in
their much larger landmasses. El Salvador is generally lower in altitude than
southern Guatemala, so even though some of the volcanoes rise quite prominently
above the surrounding plains and hills, the peaks are much lower in altitude
than those in Guatemala . The first part of the trip took in Los Volcanes
National Park about 30 miles west of San Salvador. The park technically
contains four volcanoes that are part of one large complex. Volcan Santa Ana is
the highest volcano in the country (although not the highest mountain). But at
2,365 meters (about 7,800 feet) it is lower than the bases of most of the volcanos
I climbed in Guatemala. Santa Ana is considered active and last erupted about a
decade ago but looks much more rounded than the classical cone-shaped volcano.
Nearby Volcan Izalco is considered El Salvador’s youngest volcano having only
started erupting in the 1700s and does form a perfect black cinder cone. Both
can be climbed on separate four hour guided trips, but my tour included the a
guided walk on a mile long nature trail around the forested top of dormant
Cerro Verde volcano between the two.

Below the volcano complex is one of El Salvador’s most
beautiful lakes, the Lago de Coatepeque, a sort of mini version of Guatemala’s
Lake Atitlan in a perfect looking volcanic caldera . We stopped for lunch at one
of the open air restaurants perched high above the lake on the caldera’s rim
for some local Mojarra Rellena (freshwater fish with shrimp stuffing).

The afternoon was devoted to archaeology and two of El Salvador’s
top three such sites. San Andres is a small Mayan ruin from the Classis Period
before it declined in the region. I have to admit that it was rather
underwhelming compared to much grander Mayan sites like Copan, Palenque, and
Yaxchilan. The second was Joya de Ceren, the so-called “Pompei of the Americas”
and El Salvador’s only UNESCO World Heritage site. Joya’s story is that it was
abandoned suddenly around 600 A.D. as a nearby volcano, a little bump in the
landscape, underwent an eruption that eventually buried it under about twelve
feet of ash. Unlike the grand ceremonial Mayan cities built of stone, Joya de
Ceren was a small village of regular folks and their dwellings, so it’s
considered to give some good insights into the life of the commoners .

Miguel provided another overview of El Salvadorean history,
one in which I think he tried to be somewhat more balanced than Juan Carlos’s
very right-leaning perspective. The gist is one of an elite class consolidating
political and economic power in the century and a half after independence in
the early 1800s and attempts by the dispossessed majority to gain ownership of
land and some political rights in the years leading up to the Civil War. He
seemed to well recognize that the people of his country were victims of the
larger geo-political game during the Cold War era, with the leftist FMLN forces
getting Soviet military support via Cuba and Nicaragua and the U.S. propping up
a government friendly to its interests despite its appalling human rights
abuses. It all ended with the collapse of Communism when the leftists lost
their backers and the U.S. began applying pressure to the government to negotiate
peaceful settlement once the big geopolitical game had ended. Despite problems
with gangs and violence that have emerged since, life in El Salvador is infinitely
better in the quarter century since the peace agreement with democratic
government and a wide range of personal freedoms that never existed before .

By and large it was a pretty good day and met my
expectations for seeing some more of El Salvador even if the natural and
archaeological spots are somewhat less grand than those elsewhere I’ve seen in
Central America.