Granada, Nicaragua

Landing in Managua after being in near-zero degree weather conditions is like being on the receiving end of a blast from a super-heated air gun. Not humid, but very warm. The airport is efficient and modern, but the swell of people outside the secured areas, numbering 10 for every one arriving passenger, reminds you immediately that you are in Latin America. Even though no one was there to greet us, it felt warm and welcoming.
We were soon on the road to our first destination--Granada, on the banks of Lake Colciboca (more commonly called Lake Nicaragua, the second largest lake in Latin America, and the 16th largest in the world--big, in other words). Granada was started in it's current incantation in 1524 by Francisco Hernández de Córdoba, the "founder" of Nicaragua (no doubt the indigenous population would see it differently). The city has a colonial layout, with a central square that continues to look both colonial, and uniquely Nicaraguan at the same time. The buildings are all painted traditionally bright Nicaraguan colors--yellow, pink, red, green, and blue hues abound. It is here that our journey through southern Nicaragua begins.

We stayed at an opulent colonial style hotel, named for the famed Nicaraguan poet, Rubén Darío (the hotel is pictured above, and our room is in the second photo, the door on the left). The woodwook and tile floors alone give the place a grand aura. The irony of the name was initially lost on us, but Darío is from Leon, the "other" colonial city in Nicaragua, and he never spent much time in Granada. Leon is the liberal city and Granada is the conservative one, and Darío certainly had politics that leaned towards his hometown. Granada became the more prosperous of the two cities once the Spaniards realized that the San Juan River was navigable to the Gulf of Mexico, and other than a 20 mile isthmus of land between the Pacific and Lake Nicaragua, a passage between the oceans is quite conceivable. Why this didn't become the canal seems perplexing having seen both the Panamanian and Nicaraguan sites.