🇭🇳 Honduras · Bay Islands and Caribbean
West of the city of Tela, on the Caribbean coast of Honduras, Jeannette Kawas National Park protects one of the most beautiful and diverse corners of the country's Atlantic coast. Popularly known by the name of its most famous feature, Punta Sal, the park combines in a few kilometers almost all the environments of the humid tropics: lush jungle that descends to the sea, practically pristine golden-sand beaches, mangroves, coastal lagoons like the Laguna de los Micos and coral reefs ideal for snorkeling.
The park is named after Jeannette Kawas Fernández, a Honduran environmentalist who dedicated her life to protecting this area from deforestation and uncontrolled development, and who was murdered in 1995. Her struggle made Punta Sal a symbol of Honduran conservationism. Today the area protects a treasure of biodiversity: howler and white-faced monkeys, coatis, sea turtles, manatees, dozens of bird species and a sea full of life discovered with mask and snorkel.
This guide gathers the essentials for visiting the park with a practical eye: how to get there from Tela, what the classic sea excursion to Punta Sal includes, what wildlife and landscapes to expect, how to combine it with the Laguna de los Micos and the area's Garifuna communities, and what to keep in mind to enjoy it while caring for this fragile and precious environment of the Honduran Caribbean.
The Punta Sal peninsula and the bay of Tela have a long human and natural history. Before the arrival of the Europeans, the region was inhabited by Indigenous peoples; centuries later, at the end of the 18th century, the Garifuna (people of African descent deported from the island of St. Vincent in 1797) settled on this coast, founding fishing communities that still give the area its identity today, like Miami and Tornabé. During the 20th century, the banana boom made Tela an important port of the Tela Railroad Company. Formal protection of the area came late: the Punta Sal area and its mangroves were threatened by logging, uncontrolled fishing and real-estate pressure. The environmentalist Jeannette Kawas, president of the PROLANSATE foundation, led the campaign to declare it a national park, which was achieved in 1994 (Legislative Decree 154-94). Kawas was murdered in her home in Tela on February 6, 1995; her case reached the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which in 2009 convicted the Honduran state. In her honor, the former Punta Sal National Park was officially renamed Jeannette Kawas National Park. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The heart of the Caribbean coast and of the old 'banana republic': land of La Ceiba and Tela, of Standard Fruit and United Fruit, of a massive Carnival and a vibrant Garífuna culture, where the jungle of Pico Bonito descends to the sea amid national parks and reefs.
Read the history of Atlántida →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before a national park existed, the Punta Sal peninsula and the bay of Tela formed part of a Caribbean coast inhabited and used by human beings for centuries. The coasts, lagoons and mangroves of the present-day department of Atlántida offered abundant fishing, hunting, fruit and wood, and were the territory of Indigenous peoples of the Mesoamerican region and the Caribbean sphere of influence.
The very geography of the place —a mountainous peninsula that juts into the sea, flanked by the great Laguna de los Micos and surrounded by reefs— made it a reference point for coastal navigation. According to local tradition, these sheltered coves would also have served as occasional refuge for passing vessels in the colonial centuries, on a coast that the European powers disputed.
The name 'Punta Sal' refers to a geographic feature of the coast, and over time it became the popular name for the whole area. The natural richness that the park protects today —tropical jungle, mangroves, lagoons and reefs— is the same that sustained human life for centuries in this stretch of the Honduran Caribbean.
One of the milestones that forever marked the identity of this coast was the arrival of the Garifuna people at the end of the 18th century. The Garifuna are a people of African descent born on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent, the result of the mixing of Africans —survivors of shipwrecks and Maroons— with Carib and Arawak Indigenous peoples. After resisting the British for decades, they were defeated and deported en masse: in 1797 they were taken to the island of Roatán, off the Honduran coast.
From Roatán, the Garifuna spread along the Central American coast, founding fishing communities along the Caribbean coast of Honduras, Belize, Guatemala and Nicaragua. In the bay of Tela and its surroundings, Garifuna villages were thus born, like Tornabé, San Juan and, on the sandbar of the Laguna de los Micos, the community of Miami, which still keeps that heritage alive today.
The Garifuna culture —their language, their music, their dances like the punta, their religiosity and their cuisine based on fish, cassava, coconut and plantain— was recognized by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. These communities are today an essential part of the human landscape of Jeannette Kawas National Park, where the conservation of nature and the traditional life of its inhabitants coexist.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the north coast of Honduras experienced a radical transformation driven by the banana. The large American fruit companies made the country one of the world's leading banana exporters, and the bay of Tela occupied a central place in that history: the Tela Railroad Company, a subsidiary of the United Fruit Company, was established there, making Tela one of its ports and operations centers.
The company built railroads, piers, plantations and towns, and attracted thousands of workers. Tela grew as a port and banana city, with an architecture and a social life marked by the company's presence. From that era also dates the Lancetilla Botanical Garden, founded in 1926 by the company as an experiment station to research tropical crops, today one of the largest botanical gardens in the tropics.
The banana model left a deep mark on the region: development and employment, but also economic dependence and labor conflicts that would shape Honduran history (like the great banana strike of 1954). As the decades passed and the industry was reconfigured, the pressure on the coast's natural resources —logging, agricultural expansion and, later, tourist real-estate pressure— would endanger ecosystems like those of Punta Sal, setting the stage for the conservationist struggle of the end of the century.
Toward the last decades of the 20th century, the natural richness of the bay of Tela —the mangroves of the Laguna de los Micos, the jungle of Punta Sal, the reefs— faced growing pressures. Logging for firewood and agriculture, uncontrolled fishing, pollution, the expansion of the agricultural frontier and the real-estate interest in a coast with enormous tourist potential threatened to irreversibly degrade these ecosystems.
Against that backdrop, the PROLANSATE foundation was born (Foundation for the Protection of Lancetilla, Punta Sal and Texíguat), a Honduran environmental organization dedicated to the conservation of the natural areas of the Tela area. PROLANSATE promoted the declaration and management of several protected areas in the region, among them the present-day Jeannette Kawas National Park, which protects the Punta Sal peninsula, the Laguna de los Micos, mangroves, beaches and reefs in a single ensemble.
The legal protection of the area was achieved in the early 1990s, at a time when Honduras was advancing in the creation of its system of protected areas. But declaring a park on paper is one thing, and defending it on the ground —against powerful economic interests— is quite another. That defense would have a very high human cost.
Jeannette Kawas Fernández was a Honduran environmentalist, president of the PROLANSATE foundation, who dedicated her efforts to protecting the natural areas of the Tela area, especially Punta Sal. She firmly opposed the projects that threatened these ecosystems: deforestation, the exploitation of the mangroves, the illegal appropriation of land within the protected area and the interests that sought to develop or exploit the zone.
That defense made her an obstacle for powerful economic interests. On February 6, 1995, Jeannette Kawas was shot and killed in her own home in Tela. Her death shocked the country and the environmental movement, and became one of the emblematic cases of violence against environmental defenders in Honduras, a phenomenon that would be tragically repeated in the following decades.
The case remained unpunished for years at the domestic level. Brought before the inter-American human rights system, in 2009 the Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued a ruling in the 'Kawas Fernández v. Honduras Case,' convicting the Honduran state for the violation of the activist's rights and recognizing the relationship between the defense of the environment and human rights. It was one of the first times an international court explicitly linked environmental protection with the protection of those who defend it.
In tribute to her memory, the former Punta Sal National Park was officially renamed Jeannette Kawas National Park. Thus, the name of the activist was forever linked to the nature she defended, making the park a living tribute to her struggle and a reminder of the price that defending the environment sometimes has.
Today the park protects a mosaic of ecosystems of enormous value: the jungled Punta Sal peninsula with its fauna of monkeys, coatis and birds; the Laguna de los Micos with its mangroves, a refuge for the Antillean manatee and countless waterbirds; pristine beaches and coral reefs. It's also home to Garifuna communities like Miami and Tornabé, whose traditional life forms part of the area's cultural heritage.
The management of the park, in the hands of PROLANSATE in coordination with the Honduran authorities, seeks to reconcile conservation with responsible tourism and with the well-being of the local communities. The excursions to Punta Sal, the trips through the lagoon and the contact with Garifuna culture let tourism become an ally of conservation, as long as it's done with respect. Visiting this park is, in a way, joining the cause for which Jeannette Kawas gave her life.