Posted
on November 5, 2014
This
sounds a lot like Mexican history:
On
this date in 1811, Salvadoran priest Jose Matias Delgado rang the
bells of a church to signal the beginning of a revolution – the
movement towards independence from Spain.
And
El Salvador finally won its independence on September 15, 1821.
(In
Mexico, the war of independence against Spain was marked by a priest
ringing church bells on September 16, 1810, and ended in September,
1821.)
Where
is El Salvador?
El
Salvador is the smallest and most densely populated nation in Central
America. It hugs the Pacific coast. I always think of the Pacific
Ocean as being to the west of the Americas (because it is), but
because of the curve of Central America, the Pacific actually makes
El Salvador's southern border.
When
El Salvador was a Spanish colony, its most important crop was the
indigo plant (or anil), which was used to make a beautiful blue dye.
During the late 1800s and the early 1900s, it became known as the
Coffee Republic because coffee was almost all it exported.
San
Salvador is the capital and the largest city.
What
is special about El Salvador?
Earthquakes.
Volcanoes. Destruction.
This
is not the happiest thing that could be said about a country, but El
Salvador has some pretty gnarly volcanoes. Even though the nation is
only about the size of Massachusetts, it has twenty volcanoes, two of
which are active. San Salvador was destroyed by earthquakes in 1756
and in 1854, and it was heavily damaged by three quakes in the 1900s!
One of the Salvadoran volcanoes, Izalco, erupted so regularly for 150
years that it became known as the “Lighthouse of the Pacific,”
because its flares and lava flows were visible from far out at sea.
 |
| This Googie-style car wash was located in San Bernardino, California. I live between San Bernardino and Los Angeles. |
Because
of all that destruction, San Salvador today has few Spanish colonial
buildings. Many of the city's most famous buildings are, instead, in
the Modernist or Googie style. I read that San Salvador's
architecture has been influenced by Los Angeles, California (for some
strange reason)!
(I
had to look up Googie—what the heck is Googie architecture? It
turns out that this Southern California architecture from the 1940s
to the 1960s was a sort of futurist architecture that was influenced
by car culture, jets, the atomic model, and the Space Age. Think
Disneyland's Tomorrowland!)
Okay,
here are some other things that make El Salvador special:
Surfing is big-time in El Salvador. It has one of the highest cell phone densities in the world, with 124 cell phones for every 100 people!
- Four species of sea turtles call Salvadoran coasts their home.
- The Salvadoran national soccer team has gone to the World Cup two times, and one of the best soccer players in the history of the world, Magico Gonzales, is Salvadoran.
Also
on this date:
Plan
ahead:
Check
out my Pinterest boards for:
And
here are my Pinterest boards for:
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