July 31, 2008 by sacuanjoche.

Thursday, 31 July 2008 Property investors from the US are no longer buying in Nicaragua because of the economic downturn and concerns over the political regime, it is claimed.

But European investors are stepping into the breach and the country’s property market is starting to recover from a spartan period.

‘You have to be somewhat of a contrarian to buy real estate in Nicaragua right now,’ said developer and advisor Jeff Cassel. ‘Two years ago this Nicaragua was right up there in the property-buying popularity polls. Hordes of buyers, especially soon-to-be American and Canadian retirees, couldn’t get enough of it,’ he explained.

‘Pristine properties in Nicaragua were plentiful - beachfront, mountaintop, lakeside, and everything in between and best of all, they were very inexpensive. This was the fabulous frontier, waiting to be explored and settled.’

But the US buyers dried up due to the election of Daniel Ortega as president of Nicaragua and then the economic crisis.

Now Ortega is taking steps to encourage foreign investors and is openly talking about new regulations to encourage overseas investment.

‘It’s not for the timid or for those who are worried about the country’s political uncertainties. But contrarians may win big here, as the potential for gain is great if nearby Costa Rica and Panama are any example,’ said Cassel.

Others agree. According to Robin Donaldson, a real estate agent, things are picking up gradually. ‘As Ortega refrains from pursuing an aggressive policy foreign investors and the markets are coming back to life, Nicaragua has plenty of models in Latin America for growth in the real estate sector,’ she said.

Charles Southwell of RE/MAX Granada said there is potential. ‘Nicaragua is turning into quite a tourist mecca, and it has huge investment possibilities,’ he said. He compares it to Costa Rica which has succeeded in becoming a popular tourist destination, an inexpensive place to do business and attracted global players such as Microsoft and GE.

‘The countries that build the middle class are the countries that have long-term success, and that’s what’s happening here,’ Finch said.

And some Americans are also taking the risk. ‘We’ve been getting lots of inquiries from Americans posted in Afghanistan,’ said Cassel.

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June 28, 2008 by sacuanjoche.

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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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