Travels both intrepid and trepidatious, around the world and around the block

Colonial Charm
on a Peasant's Pocketbook

A visit to Granada, Nicaragua

by Kelly Monaghan

Nicaragua seems inextricably linked (in the American imagination at least) with Ronald Reagan's and Ollie North's beloved Contras. In this version, it's a place of bloody guerilla warfare against a totalitarian commie regime. Or perhaps the country, which is at the very center of Central America, is vaguely remembered as the disaster area that drew Bianca Jagger, then wife of the head Stone, home to become the poster girl for the relief efforts that followed a devastating earthquake.

The reality is that Nicaragua today is a peaceful land of great natural beauty and charming people. It is also one of the great travel bargains of the western hemisphere. I purposely avoided Managua, the capital, so I can't report on how well it has recovered from the 1972 quake, but the places I visited seemed to be prospering. The leftist regime of Daniel Ortega has been replaced by a government more palatable to Washington, so the country is at peace and people are busily getting on with the business of being normal.

I chose Granada largely because I had only a short time in Nicaragua and it seemed like a taxi ride to the airport wouldn't be too outrageously expensive. It wasn't and the city turned out to be a perfect place to slow down and cool off after an active eco-adventure in Costa Rica.

Granada was founded in 1524 by Hernandez de Cordoba but the city we see today is of much later vintage. In 1856, the city was largely burned to the ground, by an American, no less. William Walker was a "filibuster," one of a breed of adventurers who sought to carve out countries of their own in Central America. In 1855 he seized Granada, had himself declared president of Nicaragua, instituted slavery, and declared English the national language. He had designs on the whole of Central America and the region quickly united against him. Forced to flee the city just a year later, he vengefully torched it. By 1857 he had been defeated.

So today's Granada is largely a 19th century city, and a gracious one it is, with broad avenues and handsome private residences. Its public areas are graced with spacious colonades that offer respite from the noonday sun. Like other colonial-era cities in Central America, Granada is a private place, with plainish facades often concealing grand interiors built around luxuriant garden atriums. But the face it presents to the visitor is far less austere than that of, say, Antigua Guatemala, an older and drabber (but better known) colonial city to the north. Strolling the streets of Granada is a delight and one of its chief pleasures. Each turning of a corner seems to open up a new picture-postcard vista just begging to be photographed.

Almost by default, the hotel of choice for most visitors will be the Alhambra, conveniently located on the central square. It is a gracious, if somewhat frayed-around-the-edges, hostelry with a pretty palm-fringed lobby atrium that boasts a small plunge pool. Rooms are in the $30 to $60 range. My single, while small, was perfectly adequate.

The Alhambra also boasts a restaurant, Los Arrayanes, with a terrace at street level. It's the perfect place to have breakfast, if you don't mind the perfectly charming street urchins and especially if a massive tour bus isn't idling nearby, wafting diesel fumes across your scrambled eggs.

The Alhambra is the Waldorf of Granada and much cheaper accommodations are to be found along Calle La Calzada, which leads from the central square to Lago Nicaragua and a park filled with lake shore restaurants and nightclubs. At the Hospedaje Granada a small, basic, but perfectly clean double without bath is just $10 a night; doubles with bath go for $15. There is also a small outdoor pool, which is larger than the mini-pool at the much posher Alhambra. Other guesthouses in this area, with only slightly higher prices, include The Hospedaje La Calzada and the Italiano.

The sights of Granada can be seen within a couple of hours, if you step lively. But who'd want to? Near the Parque Colon, as the central square is known, is the Casa de los Leones. Its stone portal is a haunting reminder of pre-1856 Granada. After Walker burned the place to the ground, it was rebuilt as a grand private home and today houses a cultural instution, the Casa de los Tres Mundos, which features a modest coffee shop, art exhibits and the occasional musical soiree. It's also a good place to pick up books on Granada and Nicaraguan culture.

Granada's most cherished monument is the Convent and Church of San Francisco, a short walk from Casa de los Leones. The church, which dates from 1529, was undergoing restoration when I visited but the convent was accessible. It has a colorful history, serving at one time or another as an honest to goodness convent, a military headquarters, a prison, and a university. Today it is a museum and it house the Squier-Zapatera collection of pre-Columbian monumental sculpture. The weathered black basalt monuments of the Chorotegan culture date from about 800 to 1200 AD and were unearthed by the American diplomat Ephraim Squier on the nearby island of Zapatera in Lago Nicaragua in 1849. They are hardly on a par with the grand Mayan stelae of Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico but they are worth a look.

The central square is ringed with some lovely public buildings, but its cathedral is rather plain. A far prettier church is a few blocks to the west. La Merced is a baroque gewgaw built in 1783. Its age blackened facade is wonderfully evocative and its proud cupola dominates the Granada skyscape. The interior doesn't live up to the promise of the facade but is quite lovely in its quiet way.

And that's about it for Granada's major tourist attractions. But you can have a perfectly enjoyable time strolling the street and eavesdropping on the private life of the residents. In the afternoon, many of the louvered windows and doors that face the street are thrown open to capture the cooling breezes. It's an excellent opportunity to see how the Nicaraguan gentry live. The room closest to the street is often a large, formal sitting room furnished with elaborate wicker furniture, often painted white. Beyond can be glimpsed the atrium gardens looking rather like domesticated jungles alive with luxuriant palm trees and brightly colored blossoms. If the style appeals to you, it's probably worth picking up a copy of an eye-catching coffee table book called La Casa Nicaraguense (The Nicaraguan Home), which is sold at Casa de los Leones among other places, for about $40 US.

When your feet start getting sore, it's time to hail a diligencia, one of the horse-drawn buggies that line the sides of the central square, for a 20 cent ride to the lake. Here you can choose from one of the many open-air restaurants in the Centro Turistico that line the lake shore. They don't start cranking until after dusk but when they do the music is loud and the dancing is non-stop.

There's plenty to see outside Granada as well. There are trips on the lake and small hotels on the little islands of an archipelago that lies just offshore. I stopped in to the travel agency in the Alhambra and booked a four-hour private tour with my own driver for just $36 US. We headed first to the nearby Volcan Masaya which overlooks (and occasionally destroys) the town of the same name. It hasn't rumbled to life recently, however, and the lunar landscape that rings its still-smoking caldera makes for an intriguing visit. Still here is the large cross that the Spanish conquerers raised , believing with some justification that here lay the gates to hell.

After that we headed to the "famous" Masaya crafts market which is a gussied up tourist version of the real Masaya market a few blocks away, where the same goods are available for much less. Having the luxury of my own driver I was able to find my way to the real McCoy and enjoyed the close quarters and the vibrant atmosphere of a covered bazaar that is not that much different in feel from its cousins in Korea or Uzbekistan.

For lunch we headed through the tumbledown villages of San Juan de Oriente and Catarina to a small collection of restaurants that overlook the spectacular Laguna de Apoya, an ancient volcano crater that is now filled with water and ringed in green. The thatched roof of Las Brumas de Apoya caught my eye, so I grabbed a cliffside table and treated my driver to lunch while surveying what has to be one of the best views in Nicaragua. Far below was the lake and far beyond the lake I could pick out the city of Granada and, hazy in the distance, the vastness of the Lago de Nicaragua. Most impressive, and the food was pretty good, too.

Speaking of food, Granada boasts one restaurant that is more than merely good. The Restaurante Mediterraneo on Caimito Street, just east of the central square, serves Spanish cuisine in a romantic atmosphere that evokes the languid splendor of a refined Granadan home, which is probably what the place was before it became a restaurant. Your hostess is from Barcelona and the food is just as good as I remember from the Spain of my youth. A delicious three-course meal will run about $20 without drinks.

I spent a wonderfully relaxed two days in Granada and look forward to returning again on a trip that will take me to Leon, which is another, much larger colonial city and Granada's long-time cultural and politcal rival. Then I'll set sail on the Lago de NIcaragua, like a latter-day filibuster intent on making Nicaragua my own vacation paradise.

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Colonial Charm on a Peasant's Pocketbook

A visit to Granada, Nicaragua

Colonial Charm
on a Peasant's Pocketbook