The department of Cortés, in northwestern Honduras, is the country's industrial and economic center and its most populous department, with more than 1.6 million inhabitants. It takes its name in honor of the conquistador Hernán Cortés, who reached Honduran territory in 1525 to impose order among his captains. It was created as a department on July 4, 1893, during the government of Domingo Vásquez, splitting off from Santa Bárbara.
Its capital, San Pedro Sula, was founded on June 27, 1536 by Pedro de Alvarado as Villa de San Pedro de Puerto Caballos, after subduing the chieftain Cicumba, who resisted in the densely populated Sula Valley. That valley had been a trading crossroads between the Maya and Mesoamerican worlds. After centuries of stagnation, the city was reborn in the heat of the banana companies and industry until it became the country's second city and its great manufacturing, commercial and textile-maquila hub, nicknamed 'the industrial capital of Honduras'.
The fertile Sula Valley, watered by the Ulúa and Chamelecón rivers, concentrates much of Honduran agro-industry and a dense network of cities. That economic dynamism coexisted, however, with extremely high rates of urban violence that in the 2010s made San Pedro Sula one of the most dangerous cities in the world, an image the city has sought to reverse in recent years.
The coast of Cortés was a gateway of the conquest: here Cristóbal de Olid landed in 1524 and founded Triunfo de la Cruz, in the area of Puerto Caballos, today's Puerto Cortés. Today Puerto Cortés is the main port of Honduras and one of the most important and modern in Central America, the only deep-water terminal on the isthmus with direct access to the U.S. market.
Most of the country's foreign trade passes through its docks —coffee, bananas, maquila textiles, containers— and its natural bay, one of the best on the Central American Atlantic, made it a strategic enclave from colonial times. Its modernization, with state-of-the-art container terminals and customs controls integrated with the United States, has reinforced its role as a regional logistics platform.
Alongside the port activity, Puerto Cortés preserves Caribbean beaches such as Travesía and Bajamar, with Garífuna communities, which offer a counterpoint of sea and Afro-Caribbean culture to the commercial bustle of the terminal.
A few kilometers west of Puerto Cortés rises the Fortress of San Fernando de Omoa, the largest colonial fortification in Central America. It was built by the Spanish between 1752 and 1775, under the reigns of Ferdinand VI and Charles III, to protect the coast from the attacks of English pirates and corsairs and to curb smuggling and incursions from the Mosquito Coast.
Its imposing walls of coral stone in the shape of a triangle, with moats, bastions and cannons, today shelter a museum and are one of the most visited historic sites on the north coast. The fortress was briefly taken by the English in 1779, at the height of the imperial rivalry over the Caribbean, and its history sums up the centuries of siege that the Honduran coast endured.
Omoa appears on UNESCO's tentative World Heritage list and, together with its small fishing village and its beaches, has become an attractive destination combining history, sea and gastronomy.
In the south of the department, between Cortés, Comayagua and Santa Bárbara, stretches Lake Yojoa, the largest natural lake in Honduras: a turquoise mirror of water of tectonic and volcanic origin, about 16 kilometers long and up to nearly 90 meters deep, surrounded by mountains, coffee plantations and two national parks —Cerro Azul Meámbar and Santa Bárbara. It is a paradise for birdwatching, with more than 400 recorded species, and a gastronomic destination famous for its 'kiosks' of fried fish with plantain chips.
Near the lake are the spectacular Pulhapanzak falls, with an almost 43-meter drop over the Amapa River, one of the most impressive waterfalls in the country, with zip lines and a trail that passes behind the curtain of water. In its vicinity there are also archaeological sites such as Los Naranjos, of the ancient Lenca culture, with mounds and stelae on the lakeshore.
This lake district, halfway between San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa, is one of the great natural and weekend attractions of north-central Honduras.
Cortés concentrates much of Honduras's productive apparatus: industrial parks, free-trade zones and textile maquilas that export clothing to the United States, food industry, cement plants, bottling plants and an intense commercial and financial activity headquartered in San Pedro Sula. The department generates a very high share of national GDP and is the country's great internal migration magnet.
That economic drive has given the city an identity of its own —cosmopolitan and entrepreneurial— with a cultural life that includes the Feria Juniana, its June patron-saint festivities, a mestizo cuisine and a strong presence of communities of Arab (Palestinian) origin that have marked local commerce and politics.
Between the Caribbean Sea, the agro-industrial valley, the mountains of Yojoa and the fortress of Omoa, Cortés brings together in a single department the port, industrial and nature-rich Honduras, being the great engine of development for the north of the country.