7/2 -- San Salvador

We arrived last evening in San Salvador, and were greeted  with hot humid weather at the airport, which is near the ocean. Fortunately, San Salvador itself is inland and in the hills, so it was a bit more pleasant, however, it is way hotter than we are used to at home where 70 seems like an adequately warm day.

We started at 8am with an introduction to our guide and other trip members. Then we  headed out to look at the caldera of a volcano that last erupted 100 years ago, El Boqueron. Before we hiked up to the  crater rim, we got a look at at twin-peaked volcano in the distance with a lake in front of it from a blasted - out caldera. The view was pretty smoggy, but still interesting.

Our guide gave us a short course on El Salvador's history, including the impact of focusing on coffee growing and how having the US as primary market backfired in the 1930s when the great depression hit. An uprising by the displaced and desperate workers led to a military leadership that miraculously managed to win every election for 70 years. From the point of view of the wealthy landowners (all European descendants), the starving peasants were not only thieves and miscreants but communists. The peasants, on the other hand, saw the laws change to allow the landowners to acquire their lands too, and found the communists willing to help them win justice.  The military killed off 10,000 to 30,000 indigenous people and the eventual 1982 civil war seriously impacted the population. Boys grew up in the army without an education and were only suited to carry guns. 

As a result of the fear people developed, and the number of young men who only knew how to carry a gun, the security guard business is on steroids here. The locals see the presence of guards as ensuring their safety while tourists like us find it scary that people want/need so many guards.

We visited the Museum of the Word and Image which tells the story of the conflict from the oppressed point of view and heard the  story of a man who lost his mother and 3 brothers to the conflict. He now works at the museum and although he knows who killed  his mother,  he refuses to take revenge because his father taught him not to get blood on his hands. At the end, he played a lovely song on his guitar.

After lunch, we went to the Metropolitan Cathedral of the  Holy Savior where a priest who championed the oppressed was interred after his assassination in 1980. In addition to having the priest's bloody shirt on display, it also has a suspended ring over the center of the altar featuring baby angels, representing the children who died at Herod's hands.

From there, we walked thru a depressing collection of markets lining the streets to the Holy Church of the Rosary, which sported a most interesting design. From the outside, it was not immediately recognizable as a church, but the inside was stunning in a spartan kind of way. The roof is stepped in a half circle, and each step 'riser' has randomly shaped chunks of stained glass that change from red shades to blue as you move toward the ceiling.  It was difficult in photos to really capture the wonder of it. It also had the 12 stations of the cross in a very modernistic format.

Outside of the church

Stained glass from the inside

One of the stations of the cross

Our last stop of the day was a military museum to see a  huge relief  map of El Salvador. It gave us a very good idea of the location of the city, the volcanos we saw and visited as well as our route to Honduras tomorrow, I suspect that the altitudes and distances were not in the same scale because of the apparent  height and slope of the mountains. Inside, in addition to photos and examples of war hardware (from the military point of view where the massacre was seen as useful), there was also a 'popemobile', used twice for Pope John Paul II.