The Rough Guide to Central America 2 (Rough Guide Travel Guides)

INTRODUCTION

Hemmed in by the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, the slender land bridge of Central America stretches from Mexico to South America – seven piecemeal nations stacked on top of each other in a narrowing isthmus. Its geography is in many ways its destiny: a small but distinctive region which for millennia has been the meeting point of the plants, animals and people of the giant continents to the north and the south. Although Central America has receded in the general public consciousness following the resolution of the conflicts which convulsed it during the 1980s, the region’s new-found stability has resulted in something of a tourism renaissance, as thousands of visitors have come to experience its startling natural beauty and biodiversity at first hand, along with a range of man-made attractions ranging from the Maya ruins and traditional highland communities of Guatemala to the modernist skyline of Panamá City.

Central America’s position at the volcanic cusp between North and South America, and at the meeting point of tropical and temperate climatic zones, has created a startling, often surreal landscape, ranging from the rugged, mountainous cloudforests of Costa Rica and Panamá to the impenetrable swamp-jungles of Mosquitia in eastern Honduras and Nicaragua. Beaches, coves, cayes and island archipelagos hem the coral-laced coasts, while volcanoes – some active – form a backbone of fire that stretches the length of the isthmus. Not surprisingly, given its pivotal geographical and biological position, Central America seems to have been designed for the ecotourist, with a complex system of interlocking terrains, from pristine rainforest to rare mangrove, which are home to a fascinating range of birdlife and wildlife, including tropical, temperate and hybrid species. And along with ecotourism go more traditional pleasures: lolling on Costa Rica’s palm-draped Caribbean beaches, diving and snorkelling off the coral atolls of Belize, or exploring the sand-fringed islands of Panamá’s San Blas archipelago.

Amidst all the hype about the region’s natural beauty it’s easy to forget that this part of the world was home to one of the Americas’ most sophisticated pre-Columbian cultures, the Maya, whose splendid civilization flourished in Guatemala – and to a lesser extent in modern-day Belize, Honduras and El Salvador – between 300 and 900 AD. During this period the region was made up of independent and often mutually antagonistic city-states – Tikal in Guatemala, Copán in Honduras and San Andrés in El Salvador being three of the more prominent – which fought each other for prestige and economic dominance while their architects and craftsmen fashioned fabulous cities and stelae and their scientists created the famous Maya calendar, one of the most complex systems of measuring time ever devised.

The high point of Maya civilization had already passed, however, when Central America was "discovered" by the Spanish during Christopher Columbus’s fourth and last voyage to the Americas in 1502–4. Columbus himself barely set foot in Central America, however, preferring to anchor offshore and write florid letters back home to his sovereign, packed with references to maidens and gold (of which the Spaniards unhappily discovered very little). Nearly ten years later, in 1513, the conquistador Vasco Nuñez de Balboa slashed and clambered his way over the scaly mountain spine of Panamá, becoming the first European to set eyes on the American side of the Pacific Ocean.

Within a few years, in 1519, the Spanish had established Panamá City; the city of León, in present-day Nicaragua, followed in 1524; and in 1541, in Guatemala, they established their most important capital, Antigua, from which the region was administered. Still, Central America remained a backwater of the Spanish Empire in the New World: poor in gold and stuffed with venomous snakes, impenetrable jungles and often hostile natives. In human terms, the ensuing colonial period was characterized by the arrival of waves of yeoman farmers from Spain, and the deaths of countless thousands of indigenous people from diseases to which they had no immunity, while many others were taken as slaves to work the mines in Peru.