Cerro Verde National Park and “Joya de Ceren” archeological site
I come from a country with quite a few volcanoes (Ecuador), and I have seen cones reaching the white clouds in the sky before. But today I probably had the best perspective of a volcano ever: admiring the whole shape of it, from time zero and ground zero. This impressive complex of volcanoes on the Pacific coast of El Salvador sticks up from sea level. The perfect cone on the left side of the picture used to be just a fissure in a cornfield in 1770, a hole in the ground smoking water vapor and other gases. Then the eruption began, and by 1966 it had reached its current elevation, 1910 meters, almost 6000 feet high! The name is as magical as the shape of it, Izalco volcano. Next to it we admired Santa Ana and Cerro Verde volcanoes too. But Lindblad Expeditions is always in search for more adventure and fulfillment, so we rode to the top of Cerro Verde, which is now a National Park. We walked the trails of a primary cloud forest crowded with epiphytes and admired the view of the lake inside a collapsed caldera, a distant colonial town and the perfect conical outline of the volcanoes now closer to us.
The shaping force of this land kept amazing us. It took 200 years for a volcano to reach the skies, and it only took a few hours for a volcano to completely cover an ancient town in the year 600 AD. This was our second visit of the day to “Joya de Ceren,” a UNESCO World Heritage Site where we learnt about the way the Mayans used to live. However, this community had nothing to do with the nobility nor with priests. We saw the houses, storerooms, and kitchens of common Mayan people living in El Salvador 1400 years ago. With the high-temperature ash that covered the entire town, accurate detail has been preserved for centuries. Therefore we could see how those villagers grew and ate maize, beans and cocoa the same way Central American people do today.
We traveled to the past of man and the past of this land as well. The sun was bright, the fields dressed in fresh green. We were content.
I come from a country with quite a few volcanoes (Ecuador), and I have seen cones reaching the white clouds in the sky before. But today I probably had the best perspective of a volcano ever: admiring the whole shape of it, from time zero and ground zero. This impressive complex of volcanoes on the Pacific coast of El Salvador sticks up from sea level. The perfect cone on the left side of the picture used to be just a fissure in a cornfield in 1770, a hole in the ground smoking water vapor and other gases. Then the eruption began, and by 1966 it had reached its current elevation, 1910 meters, almost 6000 feet high! The name is as magical as the shape of it, Izalco volcano. Next to it we admired Santa Ana and Cerro Verde volcanoes too. But Lindblad Expeditions is always in search for more adventure and fulfillment, so we rode to the top of Cerro Verde, which is now a National Park. We walked the trails of a primary cloud forest crowded with epiphytes and admired the view of the lake inside a collapsed caldera, a distant colonial town and the perfect conical outline of the volcanoes now closer to us.
The shaping force of this land kept amazing us. It took 200 years for a volcano to reach the skies, and it only took a few hours for a volcano to completely cover an ancient town in the year 600 AD. This was our second visit of the day to “Joya de Ceren,” a UNESCO World Heritage Site where we learnt about the way the Mayans used to live. However, this community had nothing to do with the nobility nor with priests. We saw the houses, storerooms, and kitchens of common Mayan people living in El Salvador 1400 years ago. With the high-temperature ash that covered the entire town, accurate detail has been preserved for centuries. Therefore we could see how those villagers grew and ate maize, beans and cocoa the same way Central American people do today.
We traveled to the past of man and the past of this land as well. The sun was bright, the fields dressed in fresh green. We were content.
