San Salvador fills a valley residents have called the valley of hammocks for centuries, after the tremors that regularly cross it. The city is overlooked by a volcano of one thousand eight hundred and ninety-three metres whose crater is reached in a twenty-minute drive, and it lies forty-five minutes from the Pacific surf beaches. Few capitals offer that combination.
The essentials in four lines
- No direct flight from Quebec: connect through the United States or Mexico City to Comalapa airport (SAL).
- The airport is fifty minutes south of the city, but only thirty minutes from the surf beaches.
- The US dollar is the official currency. Spanish is spoken; English is limited.
- November to April is the dry season. An altitude of seven hundred metres tempers the heat.
The crater
El Boquerón national park sits on the summit of San Salvador volcano, twenty minutes from downtown by a road climbing through coffee plantations. The crater is a kilometre and a half across and five hundred metres deep, with a secondary cone at the bottom formed in the 1917 eruption.
A made trail circles the rim in an hour, with views over the city on one side and the volcanic chain on the other. It is ten degrees cooler than below, and roadside restaurants serve the region’s coffee.
The historic centre
It has been thoroughly reworked in recent years and is covered on foot. The metropolitan cathedral, its facade decorated by the painter Fernando Llort, holds in its crypt the tomb of Archbishop Óscar Romero, assassinated in 1980 during mass and canonised in 2018. It is a place of reflection for the whole country.
The National Theatre, opened in 1917, is the oldest in Central America: French Renaissance style, painted ceiling, four levels of balconies.
But the most surprising building is El Rosario church, completed in 1971. From outside it is a bare concrete vault without ornament, which many take for a warehouse. Inside, a continuous stained-glass band runs the whole length of the arch and casts a gradient of colour that moves with the sun. It is one of the great modern religious buildings of the Americas, and almost nobody knows it.
The museums
The art museum holds the most important collection of Salvadoran painting, from the nineteenth century to today. The national anthropology museum covers the country’s pre-Columbian cultures. And the Museum of the Word and the Image, smaller and more intimate, keeps the sound and photographic archives of the civil war, including the recordings of the clandestine radio.
Around the city
Lake Ilopango, fifteen minutes east, fills a caldera sixteen kilometres across. You swim there, hire a boat, and the lakeside restaurants serve the lake’s fish.
To the south, the Devil’s Door is a rock formation split in two overlooking the valley; the road there passes through Panchimalco, a village of Pipil origin with adobe houses, and a run of pupusa stands that made the area’s reputation.
Joya de Cerén, forty-five minutes away, is the UNESCO-listed Maya site that an eruption buried around the year 600 with its houses, granaries and even the remains of meals. San Andrés, close by, rounds out the day.
Where to stay
The Zona Rosa and Colonia San Benito hold the international hotels, the restaurants and the museums. Santa Tecla, fifteen minutes west, has a pedestrian street that comes alive in the evening and smaller addresses.
There is no all-inclusive resort in San Salvador: accommodation sells by the room. Many travellers combine two nights in the city with the route of the flowers, the volcanoes and a few days on the coast. Our criteria for choosing an all-inclusive hotel will apply if you add a beach portion elsewhere.
Safety comes up in every conversation about El Salvador and the situation has changed a great deal. Rather than a picture that will age, consult the Government of Canada page, updated continuously, and discuss it with your advisor.
When to go
From November to April the sky stays clear and the air holds around 28 °C by day, with mild evenings thanks to the altitude. From May to October, showers fall in the late afternoon rather than all day, and the valley greens again.
Our guide on when to travel south from Montreal places those periods in the departure calendar.
To plan this trip, see also our Salvador, Le page and resorts that suit families.
