El Salvador Geography

El Salvador occupies about 21,000 square kilometres between Guatemala, Honduras and the Pacific. There is no Caribbean side, which makes it unique in Central America and means every beach on the map faces the same ocean.

The country is three bands. A narrow, hot coastal plain; a central volcanic highland where almost everyone lives and where the coffee grows; and the northern mountains along the Honduran border, cooler and much emptier.

Around twenty volcanoes form the middle band. Santa Ana (Ilamatepec) is the highest at 2,381 metres and last erupted in 2005; Izalco erupted so constantly between 1770 and 1958 that ships used it as a navigation mark and called it the Lighthouse of the Pacific; San Miguel in the east is among the most active in the region.

Lake Ilopango, just outside the capital, is not a lake in the ordinary sense — it fills a volcanic caldera, and its eruption in roughly 536 CE was one of the largest anywhere in the last two thousand years, with effects recorded in ice cores and tree rings on the other side of the world.

All of this sits on an active plate boundary, so earthquakes are frequent and occasionally severe.