The Travelling Teacher: El Salvador - Sweltering in Suchitoto

April 11-13

Hello everyone!

After 48 hours of recharging, washing and collecting visitors, we were back on the road. This time we were staying within the frontiers of El Salvador, heading north to one of the country’s highly recommended places to visit: Suchitoto.

Mini and Maxi joined us on this adventure

Suchitoto in the indigenous Nahuatl language
means 'place of birds and flowers'

The city is, with traffic, about a two hour journey north from Santa Tecla. Northern El Salvador was the hiding spot for many rebel villages during country’s civil war between 1980 and 1992, with soldiers often hiding in tatủs, cave hideouts scattered in the rugged terrain. Suchitoto was a key rebel village and battle town during this time. Next time I come up north, I’ll spend more time learning about the civil war and its impact here.

The closest I came to death in
Suchitoto was seeing this sign

The Civil War ended a little over 30 years ago

Suchitoto’s history runs deeper than the civil war. It is often cited as El Salvador’s ‘colonial town’, its equivalent of Antigua in Guatemala. There are similarities, such as the cobbled streets, colourful houses and sweet balconies. It is a lot smaller.

The village dates back to pre-Columbian times

The town was also very briefly the capital of El Salvador

One of many aesthetically pleasing houses

Its most beautiful building is actually more modern. The Santa Lucia Church was built in 1853. With its white-washed façade and surrounding bougainvillea, it is a very attractive site on one side of the main square.

Before this structure, Suchitoto's church was made of
...straw...you can imagine what happened to it!

It was declared a National Monument in 1978

The inside of the church

I spent a lot of my time…in a hammock. Suchitoto is a drop in altitude from Santa Tecla and in a bit of a basin, resulting in it being rather warm. It reached 99℉ on one of the two afternoons we spent there.

Turns out Maxi likes hammocks as well!

Riding on a local bus would have been very hot

Water breaks were key for the dogs

Water is a great way of cooling off in sweltering heat. Unfortunately, we are in the middle of the region’s ‘dry season’. It has briefly rained once since mid-October. This explains why Suchitoto’s nearby waterfall, Los Tercios, looks like this…

The top of the waterfall - its height is about 13 metres

The waterfall is formed by overlapping
hexagonal blocks of stone

Still, being able to see the hexagonal rock structures is pretty impressive. A young French couple were even climbing the thing when we got there!

A very different place with water, I imagine

The man said the rocks were
too slippery to get to the top

We could see water from our quaint B+B, however. We had a stunning view of Lake Suchitlán, a man-made lake. This was formed in the mid-1970s as a result of the construction of the Cerron Grande Hydroelectric Dam.

The dam provides a lot of El Salvador's electricity

The water level can rise up to 15 metres during rainy season

Mini pondering the creation of energy from water...

The lake is large, stretching dozens of kilometres across. We took an early evening boat ride to check out the sunset from the water. In doing so, we learnt that the lake has some interesting stories.

There are many little islands in the lake

Sunset from the lake

There are a few small villages on the other side of the lake -
this ferry, including 4x4 vehicle, transports people from place to place

One of these was explained to us after we noticed three small white crosses bobbing in the middle of the water. This was the site of a plane crash in 2014, when a Salvadoran military plane landed in the middle of the water. The crash killed three of the four people on board. Strangely, they decided to leave the wreckage of the plane on top of a nearby rock once salvaging it. I guess it's a sobering reminder of one of the lake’s sadder stories.