May 18, 2008 by sacuanjoche.

September 23, 2007

Nicaragua’s Ciudad of Dreams

By JOSEPH HOOPER

The last time I was in Granada, Nicaragua, was in 1984. My “solidarity gringo” friends and I, in the country to support the embattled Sandinista revolution, were taking a break from the capital city of Managua, where it seemed like every other person had an automatic weapon slung over their shoulder. But in Granada, it was as if we’d been airlifted out of the materially deprived, militarily consumed country and dropped into a charming Mexican colonial town. The houses had red-tiled roofs and brightly painted facades; the outdoor markets actually had fresh fruit and vegetables in them.

We took a boat trip to a nearby island in Lake Nicaragua, on whose northwestern shore Granada sits. At the time I regarded the experience as little more than a brief timeout from the country’s real business, which was defending and preserving the gains of the revolution.

Returning to Granada recently, I found that the city looked much the same, despite the increase of cafes, a expat restaurant or two and some hip backpacker hangouts. The Catedral de Granada and the Convento de San Francisco were still painted in hot, jazzy yellow ocher and baby blue, and the place exuded the same humid tropical beauty. From the top of the weathered bell tower of the Iglesia la Merced, I could see the hulking Mombacho volcano looming over those tiled roofs. The setting was book-cover perfect, down to the tree-lined Parque Central at the center of town, festooned with gazebos and peddler stalls and surrounded on all sides by colonial-style buildings from which modernity has mostly been expunged or simply failed to take root. The horse-drawn carriages that waited by the Parque were almost overkill. “Granada is like a time warp,” one well-to-do Managuan lady sniffed to me at a party I went to later. “Nothing happens … except tourists.”

Indeed, the tables have turned since my last visit. After a war-exhausted citizenry voted out the Sandinistas in 1990, the conservative governments that followed promoted a consumer economy and courted foreign investment aggressively enough that in the last three years or so, a tipping point has been reached. Tourism, once the dessert option in Nicaragua, is now the main course, and one of the country’s chief sources of hard cash. Understandably so. Packed into an area the size of Louisiana are some of the best aspects of the entire Central American isthmus: huge tracts of forests teeming with endangered species, like in Costa Rica; the kind of sultry colonial cities you’d find in Guatemala; and unsullied surfing beaches as good as those in El Salvador. Nowhere are these pleasures more centralized than in Nicaragua’s Pacific southwest, in and around Granada. There’s a local expression: “Granada is Nicaragua; the rest is just mountains.”

Founded by the conquistador Francisco Hernandez de Cordoba in 1524, Granada is the oldest city in Nicaragua — although Leon, to the northwest, vies for the title (it was founded the same year). Truth be told, austere Leon is better preserved, but its touristic comforts are still in an early stage of development. Granada, by contrast, is the showoff. Its felicitous location by immense Lake Nicaragua (the 10th-largest freshwater lake in the world) made it a wealthy trading center and a magnet for pirates and other firebrands, who once sacked and burned the city.

If the town’s most historic buildings have been rebuilt many times over, somehow the idea of colonial elegance is the one thing that has been flawlessly maintained. In fact, escaping many of the turmoils of Nicaragua’s recent past has been Granada’s particular genius; the city was mostly hors de combat during the revolution. The city fathers were — and still are — more preoccupied with family bloodlines and old historical battles, in a way that would be recognizable to anyone familiar with the American Old South. Granada is even famous for older folks passing the late afternoon on their front-porch rocking chairs, catching the breeze off the lake. This is a city of porch philosophers, not revolutionary martyrs.

One morning I paid a call on Granada’s leading citizen, Gabriel Pasos Wolff, 86, one of the owners of the venerable Hotel Alhambra and an owlish doyen of the rocking-chair set. Pasos and his wife live just cater-corner to the hotel (with its atypical Moorish-Vegas facade) in a mansion filled with dour oil portraits that could pass for a colonial museum. He served me an iced tea and graciously offered up a pocket history of Granada, with an emphasis on the defining catastrophe of another era, the sacking of the city in 1856 by the American William Walker. He led his own private army in a bizarre effort to conquer Nicaragua and install himself as president. (The United States government briefly recognized Walker’s claim before the warring Granada and León factions united to drive him out.) “Granada is like the Ave Fénix,” Pasos declaimed, the phoenix rising from the ashes.

A vivid sense of history and tradition is one of the place’s most enduring charms, even when it erupts at 6:30 a.m. Early one morning I was blown out of bed at the Alhambra by booming, cannonlike sounds. I rushed out into the street and caught up to the procession of San Antonio, a ragtag army of local schoolkids led by teenage girls in short brown skirts and high leather boots doing the pompom-and-baton shake and shimmy. Behind them followed younger girls dressed up in white nuns’ habits and little boys in monks’ cassocks, holding miniature prayer books. The whole procession, powered by a cacophonous brass band in the rear, redounded to the greater glory of San Antonio. Later that morning over breakfast, I asked an Alhambra waiter what San Antonio had ever done to deserve this. “He’s a saint, so we adore him,” he told me, “but I don’t remember. Ask a padre.”

The rhythm of a Granada stay often goes something like this: the early mornings and the evenings are for city pleasures. When the heat begins to build toward noon, it’s time to head into the surrounding naturaleza. Although a bunch of outdoor-excursion companies have lately sprung up here, I headed out with two friends of friends of friends: Pomares Salmerón, a young naturalist who runs his family’s private nature preserve near Managua, and Alain Creusot, a French volcanologist in his early 60s whose final ambition is to climb and study every volcano in the New World, from the Aleutian Islands to Tierra del Fuego.

In Salmeron’s S.U.V., we chugged up the paved switchbacks that took us to the upper reaches of the Mombacho volcano cloud forest, a curtain of green occasionally broken by the red flower of the malinche tree. We stashed the vehicle at the ranger hut and hiked a trail to a lookout above the volcano’s largest crater. Mombacho hasn’t had a proper eruption in centuries, which has allowed the crater to evolve into a huge sunken bowl of vegetation. It’s a nature preserve within a nature preserve, inhabited by howler monkeys and — so people say — some small jungle cats. Salmeron said the crater has become a kind of sacred site for the pagan shamans who operate out of the surrounding towns known as pueblos brujos (“warlock towns”).

As we cut back to the road and the steep climb toward the summit, Creusot expounded on the country’s state of affairs. One of the few foreigners who chose to stay in ’79, when the insurrection against the United States-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza erupted, Creusot directed journalists and Sandinista fighters to the abandoned cars and gas supplies at the French Embassy and joined them for rides through the urban battlefield. Having faced danger to witness a new country being born, he feels personally let down at how things have turned out. Nicaragua is enduring a severe energy shortage. Ortega, back in power, is now regarded as merely a man of the back-room deal. And the U.S. State Department pegs the country as the poorest in Latin America (which, for anyone who has spent time in Honduras, is truly remarkable). “Nicaragua, which is the richest country in Latin America from all points of view, is last,” Creusot said. “This I cannot accept.”

At last the cloud cover broke and we were granted a view down the lake. Zapatera Island emerged, known for its pre-Columbian archeological sites and, more grandly still, Ometepe, one of the largest freshwater islands in the world, with its smoldering Concepción volcano. Another spot gave us a view of Las Isletas, which stretch out just beyond the Granada shore. Formed by a Mombacho avalanche eons ago, they looked from this distance like pearls from a broken necklace scattered over the water’s surface. They are indeed tiny, as I saw later while exploring them by kayak. Most islands are big enough to accommodate only a single thing: a school, say, or a cemetery for the peasant fishermen who get around in old wooden rowboats. Some have been snapped up by wealthy Nicaraguans and foreigners for vacation homes. And others look like science experiments gone awry. One island has a resident population of scrawny kittens, another a fast-breeding colony of spider monkeys (reportedly descendants of an original few dropped off by a local biologist).

Another day we drove to Masaya, just outside Granada. Of modest size and lumpy shape, Masaya nonetheless impresses with its sheer volcanism. Plumes of sulfurous smoke rise from its crater with industrial constancy. As we peered down, a flock of parakeets zipped over the surrounding green field, hovered overhead and then dove in formation into the crater in what looked to be a highly organized suicide mission. The birds, Creusot explained, spent the night down there, breathing currents of fresh air sucked into the pit by the high temperatures. They can have it. At one point in our visit, the wind shifted and we found ourselves in a sulfuric whiteout.

We made it to the top of the crater’s lip and took the measure of the 33-foot cross planted there, first erected by the Spanish conquistadors in the 1500s to counter the bad vibes from the volcano, which they regarded, not insensibly, as the gates of hell. Local lore has it that the pre-Columbian Chorotega priests sacrificed virgins down there. In Nicaragua, Christian theology always seems to be at war with a landscape that feels more pagan. Even on Mombacho, as quiet a volcano as you’ll find, I had crossed the old battle lines. On a canopy tour, harnessed to a zip line cable and flying from giant tree to tree, I was joined by about 40 high school evangelicals on a mission from Omaha. One girl asked me if I was a Christian, and as there are no atheists 40 feet off the ground, I answered truthfully, “No, but I’m a fan of Jesus.”

Back in Granada, I paid a call on the Costa Rican expat Glenda Castro Navarro at El Tercer Ojo (the Third Eye), a cafe and restaurant decorated with Buddhist and Hindu icons that she opened four years ago with her husband, the French painter Jean Marc Calvet. “The Third Eye means ‘Open your eyes and see,’ ” Castro said. “I try to follow many of the teachings of Buddhism, and here it is very Catholic, so people say this is a very diabolic thing.” Castro can grow impatient with the town’s sedulous pace (“things pass so slowly here, it’s unreal”), lacking perhaps the native affection of her friend who joined us, the filmmaker Mariano Maran. “Mi Musica,” Maran’s film about Nicaraguan music, had been playing around town. “To die a Granadino is tremendously powerful,” he said. “My mother is 93, she still lives here, she still sings, she still drinks.”

For someone like MarÃn, Granada’s pull is internal, the force of family and shared history. (“I’m like an elephant; I always come back home.”) But as the very existence of El Tercer Ojo makes plain, all sorts of people are drawn into the city’s colonial vortex for all sorts of reasons. The paradox of Granada is that its aura of antique timelessness is the very thing that attracts the restless New Agers and the bohemians. And for this reason, there is a whiff of improbability: Granada of the somnolent heat and the aristocratic airs bring reconceived by foreign visitors as a model of town-and-country multisport efficiency and as an exotic stage for private obsessions. But the beauty of the place is that the different Granadas don’t collide. They rub off on one another in lively, unpredictable ways.

On my next to last night in town, I settled in for dinner at Alabama Rib Shack Bar and Grill, which everyone knows as Jimmy Three-Fingers, a few blocks from the Parque. (The baby-back ribs are first-rate.) After dinner, the proprietor, a singer-contractor-chef from Florida’s Gulf Coast by the name of Jimmy Three-Fingers — he had an accident with a table saw — belts out Jimmy Buffet and John Denver songs in a phlegmy, nicotine-stained voice to a barroom half full of nonplussed Nicaraguans and curious stray gringos. I suggested “Margaritaville.” (When in Rome. …) “Back on the Gulf Coast, the tip jar used to have a sign on it,” he shot back. “ ‘Requests: 5 cents. “Margaritaville”: $25.’ ” Repertory notwithstanding, his young Granadina girlfriend was enchanted. Hands beatifically pressed to her chest, she cooed, “I surrender every time he sings.”

The moment reminded me of something the poet and former Sandinista operative Gioconda Belli had told me before my trip. “If there is a city that has been changed by tourism, it’s Granada,” she said. But unlike some other picturesque spots I can think of, Granada hasn’t become an imitation of itself. There is room for both the ridiculous and the sublime — a festival in February, for instance, when some 200 poets declaim their verses from church atriums within earshot of Jimmy Three-Fingers’ microphone. “It feels much more cosmopolitan,” Belli said approvingly. But still, somehow, like Granada.

ESSENTIALS GRANADA, NICARAGUA

Getting There

There is a small airport outside of Granada, but it’s easiest to fly into Managua. From there, it’s about an hour by car to the city center.

Guides and Logistics

Tours Nicaragua (www.toursnicaragua.com) and Nicaragua Adventures (www.nica-adventures.com) can arrange private trips to the country, covering culture, nature and adventure. Both can plan either an entire trip or just basics like hotels and transportation. (Unless you’re comfortable with chaotic driving conditions, do not rent your own car.) Mombotour (www.mombotour.com) conducts day trips around Granada, including the canopy tour on Mombacho and kayaking tours of Lake Nicaragua (from about $25 to $51 per person).

Hotels

La Gran Francia Hotel and Restaurant. The top luxury hotel in town, with an elegant Nica-Euro fusion restaurant (entrees $9 to $20). 011-505-552-6000; www.lagranfrancia.com; doubles from $105. Hotel Alhambra. A venerable classic, if a little rough around the edges. 011-505-552-4486; www.hotelalhambra.com.ni; doubles from $55. Hotel Patio del Malinche. Basic but lovely small colonial hotel. 011-505-552-2235; www.patiodelmalinche.com; doubles from $67.

Restaurants and Cafes

Alabama Rib Shack Bar. and Grill First-rate American grub with a Latin American theme. Calle El Consulado; 011-505-552-8115; entrees $4.50 to $9.50. Las Colinas del Sur. Pure down-home Nicaragua outside of the city center, specializing in fresh fish from the lake. Shell Palmira; 011-505-552-3492; entrees $7 to $14. El Zaguan. Granada’s best traditional churrasco-style steakhouse. Calle El Arsenal; 011-505-552-6451; entrees $7 to $11. The cafes El Tercer Ojo (Calle El Arsenal; 011-505-552-6451) and Café Dec Arte (Calle Calzada; 011-505-552-6461) are Granada’s twin temples of expat bohemiana.

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May 5, 2008 by sacuanjoche.

	Monday » May 5 » 2008
Tourists discover peaceful Nicaragua The historic colonial city of Granada is a well preserved cultural oasis Silvana Saccomani Canwest News Service Saturday, May 03, 2008 If Granada invokes the heady smell of orange blossoms, the lavish Moorish-styled Alhambra or the rhythms of flamenco guitar, you’ve travelled too far. On this side of the Atlantic ocean, the Nicaraguan city of Granada is squeezed between the hulking Mombacho volcano and Lago Cocibolca, 20th largest lake in the world. Craig Baskett and Eva Logan have just returned from there. As Nicaragua celebrates its second decade of peace, tourists are discovering Granada as one of the most attractive historic centres in Central America. “Over the years we’ve spent a fair bit of time in Mexico and Guatemala, and have always enjoyed the culture and food of this region,” says Baskett, who adds they became curious about Nicaragua after hearing and reading about the country’s safety record, charming architecture and great value. MUST SEES, MUST DOS According to Logan, when it comes to Nicaraguan culture, new and old, nothing compares to Granada, which is an easy one-hour drive or cab ride from the country’s capital of Managua. Founded in 1524, Granada is today one of the oldest colonial cities in the Americas. Baskett says despite the frequent assaults from pirates and ambitious imperialists over the years, a good portion of the city’s colonial architecture remains intact. Add the narrow, cobblestone streets and courtyards cafes, and it’s no wonder this Calgary couple enjoyed the city so much. Like many towns, life in Granada unfolds in the tree-lined Parque Central. A vast square flanked by colonial mansions and an imposing bright yellow cathedral, here local artisans sell bracelets, rings and other jewelry, as well as other handmade items. Baskett says keep your eyes open for the Sultan Cigar shop. Like elsewhere in the country, these are made from 100 per cent Cuban tobacco and sell for as little as $1 apiece. After a day in the sweltering sun, Baskett and Logan retreat to their comfortable, air-conditioned room. Like the other nine rooms in Casa de San Francisco, this one overlooks a traditional colonial garden courtyard. (Casa San Francisco: 207 Calle Corral; 505-552-8235; casasanfrancisco.com; $60 a night for double occupancy and with breakfast.) By mid-afternoon, other hotel guests, also looking to cool down, join them poolside. Happy hour is well underway offering the second best bargain of the day: four bottles of Tona, the local lager, for $3. It’s here from this vantage point that Baskett comes to realize his imaginings of a dangerous Nicaragua, land of Contras and Sandinistas were clearly outdated. “At Cafe Deliet, which is on the spacious front porch of Hotel Alhambra overlooking the parque, you can feast on tender beef and tasty chicken dishes,” says Logan. “Grilled fish straight from the lake is also on the menu, and all meals come with the delicious fries made from tiny, locally grown potatoes.” After dinner she says, “It’s a good idea to pop into the Internet cafe in back of the hotel where they sell Eskimo ice cream treats, then head over to watch the teenage boys play soccer on the cobbles in front of the Cathedral.” (Cafe Deliet: Costado Oeste, Hotel Alhambra; 505-552-4486; dinner for two $40 with wine.) Another way to avoid the heat that begins to build toward noon is to head into the surrounding naturaleza. A number of eco-excursion companies have sprung up, each one prepared to take you to the upper reaches of the Mombacho volcano cloud forest. Mombacho hasn’t erupted in centuries, which has allowed the crater to evolve into a huge sunken hole of vegetation. It’s a nature preserve inhabited by howler monkeys, and some say, small jungle cats. Higher still, you are granted views of Lago Cocibolca (also known as Lake Nicaragua). Las Isletas — a cluster of 350 volcanic islands — were formed by a Mombacho lava flows eons ago. Baskett describes them as looking like “pearls scattered over the water’s surface.” Today the islands are easily accessible by taxi boat or kayak. Most are no larger than a big rock. Some have been snapped up by wealthy Nicaraguans (including the country’s president, Daniel Ortega) and foreigners for vacation homes. But hardworking fisherman and painters (whose works are on display in the local churches and elsewhere in town) make up the largest populations, and one island has a fast-breeding colony of spider monkeys. Tours, arranged through the hotel, run about $30 per person. According to this Calgary couple, some of the best aspects of Central America are packed into the area in and around Granada. There are huge tracts of forests like in Costa Rica, the kind of well-preserved colonial cities you’d find in Guatemala and unsullied beaches as good as those in El Salvador. According to Baskett and Logan, the local expression: “Granada is Nicaragua; the rest is just mountains,” pretty much sums up their experience. © The Vancouver Sun 2008

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