The department of Santa Ana holds one of the richest archaeological zones in El Salvador: Chalchuapa, the largest and most powerful Maya city in the entire west during the Preclassic and Classic periods. There stands El Tazumal, the best-preserved Maya site in the country, with its characteristic stepped pyramid of superimposed bodies reaching some 24 meters in height, active as a ceremonial and residential center between the Late Preclassic and the Early Postclassic.
The name 'Tazumal' comes from Nahuat-Pipil and is usually translated as 'place where the victims were burned'. The Chalchuapa complex also includes other monumental sites such as Casa Blanca, with its pyramids and its museum, and El Trapiche. Inhabited without interruption since Preclassic times by Maya peoples —Poqomam in the area— and later by the Pipil, the region is a crossroads of Mesoamerican cultures and a privileged window onto the deep history of the west.
Santa Ana is the second-largest city in El Salvador and the undisputed capital of the west. Known as the 'heroic city' for its role in the political struggles of the 19th century, it grew enormously wealthy with the coffee boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when it was one of the great centers of production, processing and trade of Salvadoran golden grain.
That splendor left a remarkable architectural heritage, jewels of the coffee belle époque: its imposing neo-Gothic Cathedral, one of the most beautiful temples in Central America; and the Santa Ana Theater, elegant setting for the cultural life of the coffee elite. The city preserves to this day the stately air of that golden age, with its turn-of-the-century buildings and its central park.
Santa Ana is the great base for exploring the country's most spectacular natural ensemble. The Santa Ana Volcano, or Ilamatepec, at some 2,381 meters, is the highest in El Salvador; the hike to its summit, within Los Volcanes National Park, is the most famous in the country and rewards you with the view of a crater lagoon of an intense turquoise color. The volcano is still active: its last major eruption, in 2005, forced the surrounding area to be evacuated.
The complex is completed by Cerro Verde, an ancient crater today covered in cloud forest and turned into a park, and by the perfect silhouette of the nearby Izalco volcano, contemplated from its lookout points. Together they form the Los Volcanes Complex, one of the unmissable landscapes of Central America and a symbol of Salvadoran volcanic geography.
At the foot of the volcanoes gleams Lake Coatepeque, a great volcanic caldera of intensely blue waters, formed by the collapse of ancient volcanoes tens of thousands of years ago. Surrounded by steep slopes covered in vegetation and dotted with holiday houses, restaurants and jetties, it is one of the most beautiful landscapes of the west and a weekend destination much loved by Salvadorans.
The lake hides geological curiosities: its waters sometimes change color from blooms of microorganisms, and within it there emerged, after an eruption, a small island, Teopán Island, with archaeological remains. Coatepeque —'hill of the snakes' in Nahuat— thus combines natural beauty with the indigenous memory of the region.
Toward the north of the department, Santa Ana becomes wilder and less traveled. Metapán, a city of colonial origin with one of the most notable Baroque churches in the country, is the gateway to Montecristo National Park, a high-altitude cloud forest shared at the point where the borders of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras meet —the so-called Trifinio— a refuge of exceptional fauna and flora.
Nearby lies Lake Güija, a body of water shared with Guatemala, dotted with islands, petroglyphs and archaeological sites that speak of a millennia-old human occupation. With its volcanoes, lakes, cloud forests and Maya ruins, the department of Santa Ana concentrates much of the natural and historical appeal of western El Salvador.