Not every place on this site is somewhere I visited as a grown traveler. Lago de Ilopango goes back further than that, to the early 90s, when I was living in El Salvador and going to school there. Walking to the Water My aunt lived in San Felipe, Ilopango, and from her house it was…
Not every beautiful place in El Salvador is on the coast. About an hour from San Salvador sits Lake Coatepeque, a volcanic crater lake that might be the most striking body of water in the country, and one that most visitors never hear about before they land. A Lake That Changes Color I first visited…
Ask anyone what El Salvador eats and you’ll get one answer: pupusas. And they’re not wrong to say it. A fresh pupusa off the comal, stuffed with cheese, beans, or chicharrón, is one of the great simple pleasures of Latin American food. But stopping the conversation there misses most of what’s actually happening on plates…
If El Zonte is where you go to unwind, El Tunco is where you go to feel the pulse of El Salvador’s surf scene. I visited on an afternoon in September 2022, and even in a few hours the energy of the place was obvious — surf schools lining the beach, surfers in the water…
Most first-time visitors to El Salvador beeline for the coast — and understandably so, the beaches deserve the attention they get. But inland, scattered across the country’s hills, are colonial towns that most travelers never make time for. That’s a mistake. These are the places where El Salvador’s history is still standing, literally, in cobblestone…
El Salvador’s coastline doesn’t get talked about the way Mexico’s or Costa Rica’s does — which is exactly why it’s worth your attention. There’s no wall-to-wall resort development here, no fifteen-minute walk between souvenir shops. What you get instead is a stretch of Pacific coast that still feels like it belongs to the people who…
Let me answer the question directly before anything else: yes, El Salvador is safe to visit in 2026. Not “safe enough.” Not “safer than it used to be.” Genuinely, measurably, remarkably safe — by any metric, including those outside El Salvador’s own government figures. I say this as someone with real history in this country….
My first memory of San Salvador is from childhood — loud, busy, and alive in a way that never felt overwhelming, just full. Full of people, full of noise, full of movement. That energy never really left the city. It just changed shape over the years. And what it’s becoming right now is worth seeing…
There’s a moment that happens every time I land in El Salvador. You walk out of the airport and the humid heat of the tropics hits you like a warm hug. Some people might not count that as a selling point — but for me it’s the beginning of everything. The birds in the trees,…