Granada

Granada was founded in 1524 on the shore of Lake Cocibolca — a body of water so large the Spaniards called it the Freshwater Sea — and it is the oldest European city on the mainland of the Americas that has stayed where it was put: a grid of painted arcades, tiled roofs and inner courtyards running from the yellow cathedral down the Calle La Calzada to the lake, with the volcano Mombacho over its shoulder and the three hundred and sixty-five isletas that its eruption threw into the water. It has been sacked by pirates who sailed up the river from the Caribbean and burned by a filibuster who left a sign saying 'Here was Granada'; it is still here.

The traveller walks the grid at morning and evening — the Parque Central, the cathedral, La Merced's bell tower for the view of roofs and lake, the convent of San Francisco —; takes a boat through the isletas at sunset, past the herons and the houses of the rich; climbs Mombacho for the cloud forest and its howler monkeys; drives at dusk to Masaya, whose crater holds a lake of lava that glows in the dark from the rim; swims in the Laguna de Apoyo, a crater lake of warm blue water; and, with a day, crosses to Ometepe, the two-volcano island in the middle of the sea of fresh water.

The Guide's honesty: Nicaragua asks for fresh information — the country's politics have thinned the tourism it once had, and the traveller who comes should read the current word and keep to normal care, which most find is enough in Granada's calm streets —; the heat from March to May is serious and the arcades exist for it; the lake is not for swimming near town; boats to the isletas and guides for the volcanoes are set-price and honest; and the town's beauty is exactly as advertised, and mostly to yourself.