San Salvador

San Salvador lives in a bowl of green fire: a capital ringed by volcanoes, with her own — the Boquerón — opening a perfect crater twenty minutes from downtown. For years she practiced being avoided; now she practices being visited, and the learning is visible everywhere: the historic center reborn around the Palacio and a brutalist church that pours rainbows, the night markets steaming, the surf coast forty minutes down the hill.

The sensible traveller starts at the centro histórico: the National Palace, the crypt of Óscar Romero under the cathedral, and El Rosario — concrete outside, a waterfall of colored light inside, the region's most surprising church. Then up the Boquerón for the crater walk and coffee at altitude; and any evening, a pupusería bench: cheese and loroco, curtido on top, honesty by the plateful.

The Guide's honesty: the country rewrote its security story and the streets show it — still, travel on current information, as everywhere young in its calm —; the pupusa is a two-hand food and a one-dollar university; and the sea is absurdly close: if the swell calls, El Tunco answers before sunset.