El Salvador

El Salvador was a similarly blank slate for us as Belize. Before we paid it a visit ourselves, we mainly associated the smallest country in Central America with the terms civil war and poverty.

From the late 1970s to the early 1990s, El Salvador was the focus of international attention due to the civil war. The war, in which a left-wing insurgency movement fought against the Salvadoran armed forces that were supported by the USA, claimed 75,000 lives. After the peace agreement of 1992, the country slowly recovered, only to be heavily damaged again by Hurricane Mitch in 1998 and a severe earthquake in 2001. Due to the widespread brutal gang violence, El Salvador was considered the world’s most dangerous country until recently. 

In the meantime, the situation has improved and travelers can discover the beautiful sides of the country with relative ease. El Salvador offers a varied landscape. There are more than 100 volcanoes, of which around twenty are potentially active, and with so many volcanoes there are of course beautiful crater lakes. The endless beaches on the Pacific invite you to swim and surf and the Spanish have also left behind a colonial city or two in El Salvador. Despite its small size, El Salvador was once the fourth-largest coffee producer in the world and its coffee is known worldwide. The friendliness of the people was particularly emphasized by other travelers and so we were once again curious to see what would await us in country number 8 on this trip.