El Salvador

Maya and later Nahua-speaking peoples lived in what is now El Salvador for thousands of years. The Pipil, who arrived from central Mexico around the 11th century, called their land Cuzcatlán, 'place of precious jewels'.

Around AD 600 the Loma Caldera eruption buried the farming village of Joya de Cerén under several metres of ash. Houses, kitchens, gardens and pots were preserved, giving archaeologists a rare picture of everyday Maya life rather than temples and kings.

Tazumal in Chalchuapa and San Andrés near Joya de Cerén were larger ceremonial centres. The eruption of Ilopango around AD 431–540, one of the largest in the last few thousand years, devastated the centre of the country.

The Spanish under Pedro de Alvarado invaded in 1524 and met strong Pipil resistance; the colonial province grew rich on indigo, the blue dye that still marks crafts in Suchitoto.

After independence in 1821, coffee replaced indigo. In the late 19th century communal Indigenous lands were abolished and a small group of families, the so-called fourteen families, came to own much of the best land.

In 1932 a peasant and Indigenous uprising in the west was crushed by the army under General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez. The massacre, La Matanza, killed thousands, and many Nahua-Pipil people stopped speaking their language and wearing traditional dress to survive.

Military governments ruled for decades. On 24 March 1980 Archbishop Óscar Romero, who had spoken out against repression, was shot while saying mass. Civil war followed between the US-backed government and the FMLN guerrillas; about 75,000 people died, including in the El Mozote massacre of 1981.

UN-brokered peace accords in 1992 ended the war and turned the FMLN into a political party. Romero was canonised as a saint in 2018, and his tomb in the cathedral crypt is a place of pilgrimage.

About 6.3 million people live in El Salvador, the most densely populated country on the Central American mainland, and perhaps another two to three million Salvadorans live in the United States.

War and poverty drove migration from the 1980s. In Los Angeles, young migrants formed the MS-13 and Barrio 18 gangs, and US deportations in the 1990s and 2000s brought them back to El Salvador, where they spread through poor neighbourhoods.

Remittances from the diaspora make up about a quarter of the economy, and US holidays, English words and returnee-run businesses are part of daily life. Many surf-town workers learned their English in the US.

Most Salvadorans are mestizo; Nahua-Pipil and Lenca communities survive in the west and east, and efforts to revive the Nawat language continue in Santo Domingo de Guzmán and Nahuizalco.

The pupusa is the national dish: corn dough patted around a filling of cheese, beans, pork crackling or loroco flower buds, cooked on a griddle and eaten with curtido, a lightly fermented cabbage relish, and thin tomato sauce.

Its roots go back to Pipil cooking, and it spread nationally in the 20th century. A national pupusa day has been celebrated on the second Sunday of November since 2005. Olocuilta, on the airport road, is famous for rice-flour pupusas.

Other favourites include yuca frita with chicharrón, panes con pollo at Christmas, tamales in banana leaves and seafood mariscada on the coast. Weekend food fairs, like the one in Juayúa, bring grills and sweets to the town squares.

Coffee is the heritage crop: Salvadoran farms developed the Pacamara variety, a cross of Pacas and Maragogype, now prized by speciality roasters.

More than twenty volcanoes rise across the country. Santa Ana (Ilamatepec) is the highest at about 2,380 m, with a turquoise acid lake in its crater; Izalco, its young neighbour, erupted so often in the 18th–20th centuries that sailors called it the lighthouse of the Pacific.

Crater lakes such as Coatepeque and Ilopango fill old calderas, and San Salvador sits beneath the San Salvador volcano, whose Boquerón crater is a park above the city. Earthquakes have destroyed the capital many times, most recently in 1986 and 2001.

The Pacific coast west of La Libertad has a run of right-hand point breaks — Punta Roca, El Sunzal, El Zonte — that made El Salvador a surf destination. The government branded it Surf City and built a coastal highway, and the country has hosted international surf contests.

Montecristo's cloud forest, where El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras meet, and the mangroves of Jiquilisco Bay are the main protected areas in a country that has lost most of its original forest.

Nayib Bukele, a former mayor of San Salvador, won the presidency in 2019. After a weekend of gang killings in March 2022, the Legislative Assembly approved a state of exception that suspends some constitutional rights; it has been renewed every month since.

More than 80,000 people have been detained, many held without trial, and the CECOT mega-prison opened in 2023. Homicides fell to among the lowest rates in the Americas, and Bukele's popularity soared; human rights groups document thousands of arbitrary arrests and deaths in custody.

In 2021 El Salvador became the first country to make bitcoin legal tender. Under a 2025 agreement with the IMF, the law was changed: businesses no longer have to accept bitcoin and taxes cannot be paid with it. The US dollar, the currency since 2001, remains what visitors use.

Bukele was re-elected in 2024 despite a constitutional bar, and 2025 reforms allow indefinite re-election. For travellers the change is visible: fewer street-crime warnings, more checkpoints, and a tourism push around Surf City. Carry ID, respect the rules and remember that legal protections are weaker than they were.