El Salvador
Discover El Salvador
Introduction
El Salvador is the smallest country in mainland Central America — about 21,000 square kilometres — and the most densely populated, with some 6.3 million people.
It is also the only Central American country with no Caribbean coastline. Everything faces the Pacific, and that single fact shapes the beaches, the weather and the surf.
Salvadorans call it the land of volcanoes, and around twenty of them run in a chain across the country, several still active. You can be on a black-sand surf beach in the morning and standing on a crater rim at 2,000 metres by lunchtime — nothing here is more than a few hours from anything else.
El Salvador spent twelve years in a civil war that ended in 1992, and much of the last thirty has been defined by what came after it. The country is now in the middle of a third chapter, and it is the one visitors most need to understand before arriving.