The department of Gracias a Dios, in the far northeast of Honduras, is known as La Mosquitia: the country's great virgin jungle and one of the most extensive and sparsely populated natural areas in Central America. With nearly 17,000 km², it is the second-largest department in Honduras after Olancho and the youngest of the 18, with barely some 90,000 inhabitants spread across six municipalities. Its capital is Puerto Lempira, on the shores of the enormous Caratasca lagoon.
Its name comes from Cape Gracias a Dios, which according to tradition Christopher Columbus named in 1502. It is a region practically without roads connecting it to the rest of the country, reachable only by small plane, river or sea, with an extremely low population density and vast stretches of jungle, savanna and wetlands.
That condition as Honduras's 'end of the world' has preserved its nature and its culture, but has also kept it in isolation and neglect, with enormous shortfalls in basic services.
For centuries, this coast —the Mosquito Coast— lay outside Spanish control and under English influence. Around 1620 the Miskito kingdom arose, whose kings were crowned under the protection of the British crown, which established a protectorate here from the late 17th to the mid-19th century. The Miskito, allies of the English, dominated much of the Caribbean shoreline and harassed the Spanish settlements of the interior.
That particular history explains the strong indigenous and Anglo-Caribbean identity that sets this region apart from the rest of Honduras and its late effective incorporation into the national state, which was consolidated only in the 20th century. The department as such was created only in 1957, which makes it the most recent in the country.
The mix of Miskito heritage, English presence and indigenous roots makes La Mosquitia a culturally unique region, with a language and traditions of its own that differentiate it from the rest of Honduras.
La Mosquitia is the heart of indigenous Honduras: within its territory live four of the country's nine indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples. The Miskito, the majority group, are fishermen and navigators of the coastal lagoons and of the shrimp fishery; the Pech (Paya) and the Tawahka (Sumo) are hunters and farmers of the deep jungle; and Garífuna communities populate the shoreline. Puerto Lempira, on the Caratasca lagoon, is the capital and main point of access.
These cultures preserve their own languages, ancestral knowledge of the forest and a unique relationship with the rivers, which are their true roads. Shrimp fishing, often by Miskito divers in dangerous conditions, is one of their main sources of income, at a high cost in health and lives.
The region today faces strong pressures from the advance of cattle ranching, illegal logging, mining and drug trafficking —which has used its remote airstrips and coasts— threats that strike both the forests and the ancestral territories of its peoples.
The greatest treasure of La Mosquitia is the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve, the first of its kind in Central America (1980) and declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1982. It covers nearly 7% of Honduran territory and is the best-preserved rainforest in the country and one of the largest on the isthmus, home to jaguars, tapirs, peccaries, manatees, crocodiles, macaws and monkeys, as well as indigenous communities that live in harmony with the forest.
Its ecological importance is enormous: it forms part of the 'great lungs' of Central America and protects the watersheds of rivers such as the Plátano and the Patuca. However, the pressures of deforestation and colonization led UNESCO to include it on the List of World Heritage in Danger, a warning about the threats looming over this paradise.
Traveling through the reserve by dugout canoe, among virgin jungles, petroglyphs and indigenous villages, is one of the great adventure experiences in all of Central America.
In these jungles also lies the myth of the 'White City' or City of the Monkey God, a legendary lost city sought by Western explorers since the time of Hernán Cortés and the conquistadors of the 16th century. For generations, adventurers and archaeologists combed La Mosquitia in search of that golden city hidden in the jungle.
On March 2, 2015, National Geographic magazine announced that an expedition had documented in the region an ancient city in ruins, with plazas and mounds of a little-known pre-Columbian culture, reviving the myth and demonstrating that important civilizations had existed in those jungles before the Europeans. The findings are still being studied by archaeologists.
In addition to the reserve and the legend, the department offers extreme nature experiences such as the Ibans lagoon, the town of Brus Laguna and river expeditions along rivers that cross one of the last great virgin jungles on the continent. It is the adventure destination par excellence of Honduras.