🇸🇻 Central America
, the Tom Thumb of the Americas: world-class surf along the Pacific coast, smoking volcanoes, colonial towns on the Ruta de las Flores and a compact country where you can have pupusas for breakfast and end the day watching the sunset over the ocean.
Traveler's tip: El Salvador uses the US dollar, so you don't need to exchange any local currency. Bring small bills (1, 5 and 10 dollars): at markets, on buses and at pupusa stands it can be hard for them to break large notes. Cards are accepted at hotels and restaurants in the cities, but in the towns and along the coast it's best to always keep cash on hand.
Full converter for USD →The gateway to the country is El Salvador International Airport San Óscar Arnulfo Romero (SAL), located in Comalapa, about 45 km southeast of San Salvador. It is the most important hub in Central America for Avianca, which operates the largest number of routes and connections from South America, North America and the rest of the region. Copa Airlines (via Panama), United, American, Volaris and other low-cost carriers also fly in. Because of its size, El Salvador has no significant domestic commercial flights: everything is covered by land and the distances are short. Comfortable, affordable buses run between the major cities, along with a network of urban and rural buses that connects practically every town (they're usually old, colorful "camionetas", cheap but slow). For the coast and the tourist destinations there are private shuttles and vans that leave from San Salvador. In the cities you'll find taxis and apps like Uber and InDrive, very handy in San Salvador and the surrounding area. For more flexibility, renting a car is a good option: the main roads are in good condition and let you combine coast, volcanoes and towns at your own pace. As everywhere in the region, it's best to travel during the day and avoid driving at night on secondary roads.
El Salvador is the smallest and most densely populated country in mainland America —barely 21,000 square kilometers— yet its history distills all the intensity of the Central American isthmus. It was the heartland of the Pipil dominion of Cuzcatlán, 'the land of precious things', a world of Nahuat roots that flourished on a land of active volcanoes, frequent earthquakes and extraordinarily fertile soils. Before the Pipil, the Maya and Lenca inhabited the territory for millennia, leaving behind such testimonies as Joya de Cerén, the village buried in ash that is today the 'Pompeii of the Americas'. Upon that indigenous foundation there arose, after the conquest by Pedro de Alvarado in 1524, a modest province of the Captaincy General of Guatemala that grew rich first on cacao and indigo, and later on coffee.
From that land of volcanoes and coffee emerged a tenacious and contradictory nation. The coffee republic of the 19th and early 20th centuries concentrated wealth in a handful of families —the famous and somewhat mythical 'oligarchy of the fourteen families'— and sowed an inequality that erupted in the Matanza of 1932, in the military dictatorships and, finally, in the civil war that between 1980 and 1992 left some 75,000 dead and disappeared. The Chapultepec Peace Accords ended the conflict and opened a still-young democracy, marked by mass emigration, remittances, the violence of the maras and, in recent years, by the profound shifts of the Nayib Bukele era.
Read the full history of El Salvador →Pick a region and open each destination to see what to do, prices and how to get there.
