🇭🇳 Central America
Coral reefs off the Bay Islands, the Maya ruins of Copán, coffee-covered mountains and a Caribbean coast that steals your heart. Honduras is pure nature and living culture, without the crowds.
Traveler's tip: carry cash in lempiras for markets, buses and small towns, where cards aren't always accepted. In Roatán and other tourist areas the dollar circulates without any trouble, but you're better off paying in lempiras to avoid unfavorable exchange rates. Withdraw cash from ATMs in the larger cities and let your bank know before you travel.
Full converter for USD →By plane. The main international airports are Ramón Villeda Morales (SAP) in San Pedro Sula, the country's best connected; Toncontín (TGU) in Tegucigalpa; and Juan Manuel Gálvez (RTB) in Roatán, the gateway to the Caribbean. Airlines such as Avianca, American, United, Copa and the regional CM Airlines operate international and domestic routes. Domestic flights. CM Airlines and other operators connect San Pedro Sula, Tegucigalpa, Roatán and La Ceiba. They're a good way to save hours of road travel between the coast and the interior. By bus. The bus is the backbone of transport in Honduras. Companies like Hedman Alas and Pullmantur offer comfortable, direct services between the major cities. For shorter hops there are local buses and rapiditas (minibuses), cheap but slower.
The history of Honduras is that of a mountainous isthmus between two seas, where the Maya flourished, where Christopher Columbus came ashore on his final voyage, and where the indigenous resistance of the chieftain Lempira was waged. The geographic heart of Central America, with coasts on the Caribbean Sea and on the Gulf of Fonseca in the Pacific, this land of cloud forests, fertile valleys and coral reefs was home to the Maya-Chortí, Lenca, Tolupán, Pech, Tawahka, Miskito and Garífuna peoples before the Spanish conquest turned it into the peripheral mining province of Comayagua within the Captaincy General of Guatemala. From its independence in 1821 and the short-lived Central American Federation presided over by the Honduran Francisco Morazán emerged a republic that endured nearly a century of civil wars before reinventing itself, in the 20th century, as the quintessential 'banana republic'.
Coups d'état and caudillos, the long dictatorship of the 'Cariato' (1933-1949), the historic banana strike of 1954, the Football War with El Salvador in 1969, the military governments and the bloody Battalion 3-16 of the 1980s, the devastation of Hurricane Mitch in 1998, the 2009 coup against Manuel Zelaya, and the 'narco-dictatorship' that led former president Juan Orlando Hernández to a 45-year sentence in New York all left their mark on a poor and unequal country, battered by gang violence and mass emigration, yet possessed of extraordinary cultural and natural riches.
Read the full history of Honduras →Pick a region and open each destination to see what to do, prices and how to get there.
