With our absolutely fantastic – somewhat strenuous – hike around Mombacho Volcano complete we hopped back onto our mini-bus and headed towards the city of Granada on the shore of Lake Nicaragua. We’d seen the city from the volcano and now it was time to see the buildings up close.
Our drive through Granada came complete with an explanation from our guide regarding the historical significance of the city as well as descriptions of its architectural styles and you can see and hear some of that for yourself in the following short bit of video shot from the bus.
We would have a chance to look a little closer at some of the buildings but first order of business was lunch.
Lunch In The Garden Cafe
Lunch was taken in The Garden Café, a local business doing lots of good work in the community especially with regards to education for young girls, offering lots of decent benefits to its employees, and acting in a sustainable way for the environment. On top of all that it was an absolutely lovely location to have a sit down and enjoy some food and drink. The courtyard style of the restaurant was one that was shared by a lot of the houses in Granada.
There were a few choices for our group booking at the restaurant and both my wife and I went for the fish option. I loved this; the sauce and coating on the fish were just lovely. My wife, however, found it unappealing to her tastebuds; it was the fact that the fish was cold. Again, I loved it, this was absolutely fine to me, a real melt-in-the-mouth meal. Our lunches came with cheese, though, and I find cheese just nasty with one of those difficult-to-imagine historic inventions –
Geoff, you see where that cow’s milk fell into that pot and was left in the sun and became riddled with infection and hardened? Dare you to eat it!
– while my wife could probably live on the stuff. As a result she didn’t do too badly out of the food as we ended up swapping items on our plates.
Our lunch came with a soft drink but we could throw a few dollars in and get a local beer if we wanted. And we wanted. In fact, the restaurant also does craft ales which we’d not realised at the time, but we can’t complain; the beer was cold, refreshing, and from Nicaragua; all things that were important for us in our ongoing quest to mask borderline alcoholism as experiencing what the world’s brewers have toiled to produce.
After eating, having a quick look at the shop attached to the restaurant, then using the toilets before the long drive back to San Juan del Sur, we were directed to head one block to the west to take a look at the Central Park of Granada where we would be meeting our bus.
Granada, History And Architecture
Granada is famous for its colonial architecture but, as our guide had explained on the bus ride, while the style of the buildings may be heavily colonial they were built more recently, late nineteenth and early twentieth century for the main part. The reason for this lies in the history of Granada and it’s quite a fascinating one.
There were two aspects of history that combined to make Granada the way it is: firstly, there was the geographical location; secondly, there was the American nasty piece of work, William Walker.
Léon had been Nicaragua’s capital since colonial times as it had been one of the first cities founded but its location on the Pacific coast was less useful than that of the city of Granada which sat on the shore of Lake Nicaragua and thus had a good trade route through to the Atlantic through the San Juan River. The two cities became rivals for trade and influence with liberal administrations in Nicaragua preferring Léon and using it as the capital only for conservative administrations to favour Granada and use it instead. Eventually, a compromise was reached between the two cities and Managua became the nation’s capital but not before there was a civil war in 1854.
William Walker was, basically, a racist piece of crap. A well-educated racist piece of crap unlike most modern day racist pieces of crap but still. On numerous occasions he had led mercenaries and sought to establish independent states over which he could rule in California and Mexico, and he had a lot of support in the southern states of the US due to his pro-slavery stance. He had already been tried in America for violating the Neutrality Act of 1794 (which made it illegal for an American to wage war in a country at which the United States was at peace) during his Mexican land-snatch but had been acquitted due to his popularity among other racists and Manifest Destiny believers.
In 1855 Walker arrived in Nicaragua at the request of the government of Léon to assist in their civil war with Granada. To get around the Neutrality Act he was invited to bring “colonists” who were then granted the right to bear arms in defence of the city. In October of that year his mercenaries defeated the defence at Granada and effectively put Walker in charge of Nicaragua through his position as commander of the army. Investors in the region were concerned that Walker’s ambitions to turn the entire region into a slave state under his control might impact on their business and this fear seemed founded when assets of the American magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt‘s company – which did a lot of trade through the San Juan River and Lake Nicaragua – were seized. This turned out to be because subordinates of Vanderbilt had encouraged Walker to do this so that they could profit but this wasn’t known at the time and Vanderbilt sent agents to Costa Rica to start exploring retaliatory measures with its government. Walker launched a preemptive attack on Costa Rica when he realised that country was mobilising forces but was defeated and pushed back. This loss encouraged other neighbouring countries to step up and put a stop to Walker’s apparent ambitions and so Honduran and Salvadoran fighters engaged from the north while Costa Rica approached from the south, closing off supply routes through the rivers as well as discouraging material support from America for Walker through Vanderbilt’s business influences. Walker was defeated at the end of 1856 with Granada surrounded by forces from Costa Rica, Honduras, Salvador, and Guatemala. During his retreat from the city and prior to surrender he ordered his troops to burn and flatten Granada which they did over the course of two weeks.
Granada’s location was still important despite it being levelled so the city and its buildings was gradually rebuilt and in most places in the original style, whether that was neoclassical, baroque, or more commonly, colonial.
In light of his importance in Granada’s history and because there’s also a very small connection to my home city and I never pass up a chance to mention that on this site, Walker’s end is also worth a quick mention here. Following his defeat in Nicaragua, Walker surrendered to the American Navy and returned home to America where his initial popularity waned after he started blaming the navy for his defeat. British colonists in Roátan in the Caribbean requested Walker’s help in 1860 in establishing an independent, English-speaking government as they feared that Honduras would assert control over their land and Walker jumped at the chance to start again. The British government, however, had enough economic and strategic interests in the region that they didn’t want Walker threatening to destabilise it all so they sent Commander Nowell Salmon to capture him. This was done but rather than hand Walker over to America he was instead delivered to Honduras and given to their authorities; there he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death by firing squad. And the connection to my home city? Commander Nowell Salmon was eventually made Commander-in-Chief, Portsmouth and died in the city in 1912.
History lesson over, let’s get back to the business of concluding our cruise excursion in Nicaragua.
On our right side as we approached the Central Park we passed the Calzada Art Centre in Plazoleta de los Leones, buildings around a square with a couple of monuments dedicated to events in the city’s history.
A large square to the east of the park was Plaza de la Independiencia and the Plaza de la Catedral joined it forming one, large, open space. As the latter square’s name suggests (unless you are absolutely hopeless at guessing foreign words), the most prominent structure here was the neoclassical church, Our Lady of the Assumption Cathedral, although beautiful buildings were all around. A church has stood in this spot since 1525.
The park area was a reasonably popular spot for locals and tourists to cool off under the shade of the trees and there were numerous market stalls out offering plenty if you wanted to look. Of course, just standing still for a few seconds with a camera in your hand was enough to bring the street vendors to you and it would be fair to say that they may not have been the most persistent of sales people we’ve ever encountered when we’ve travelled abroad but they were certainly in the reckoning for a runners-up medal. Which they would probably have then offered back to us at a steadily decreasing bargain price while following us to our vehicle. Still, it’s their livelihood, it’s their culture, it’s just something you have to accept when you visit any tourist-heavy area in a poorer part of the world, and if we’d had Nicaraguan money on us we would gladly have spent it here but it was the only currency we couldn’t pick up ahead of the cruise so we didn’t.
Leaving Nicaragua From San Juan Del Sur
All that remained for this day in Nicaragua now was to jump aboard our mini-bus and make our way back to San Juan del Sur where we hoped our cruise ship would still be waiting. Hoped. If you’ve read the first part of this full day’s excursion (yeah, I’m well aware you haven’t) then you’ll already know that our day trip had started late and the notices indicating last time aboard the ship were a lot earlier than we would have been expected back even if we’d left on time. In fact, as we left Granada it was almost the Last Aboard time already and we had at least 90 minutes of driving ahead of us. It would be fair to say that even with our guide’s assurances that the ship would wait there was just a glimmer of worry in the faces of us and our fellow passengers. Not a lot we could do about it, though, so we enjoyed the bumpy ride as much as we could and I grabbed some more shaky video footage from the window as we made our way back to the port along the road that tracked Lake Nicaragua and its volcanoes.
At San Juan del Sur we were relieved to see other buses debarking cruise ship passengers at the port and a couple of buses pulling in behind us too so we weren’t the last people back. Most importantly, we could still see Star Princess out at sea. A Princess Cruises representative was standing at the pier and encouraging everyone to ignore the shops and hurry along to the tender boat which we duly did. As we waited to begin our short trip across the water back to the ship we overheard a radio message to the tender boat pilot stating that there was a medical emergency evacuation due to take a passenger off the ship and ashore imminently so we knew there would be a further delay before departure anyway.
I hadn’t been able to get up top on the tender boat but I was lucky enough to be seated by the open section at the midpoint which would normally allow egress from the boat once docked. This meant I could snap some photos of the rocky headland to the south of San Juan del Sur as we made our way to the ship.
Back aboard after a long but fantastic day in Nicaragua I headed out to the balcony while my wife showered and changed. More tender boats came and went which made a mockery of the Last Aboard time until I wondered whether that time had been set to ensure that those who’d made their own arrangements or just been ashore in San Juan del Sur were not going to cause unnecessary delays when the organised tour buses got back a little later. No way to know for sure.
I had time to shower and change too and we still hadn’t left the Nicaraguan port although there was an announcement that the ship would be turning to make it easier for the last tender boat to get back and be raised into position. This gave us a different view of San Juan del Sur although the fading light as dusk fell didn’t help the camera too much.
There was no disputing that the sunset as we waited to leave was another classically gorgeous and instantly relaxing one.
It was while we were admiring the setting sun on the Pacific horizon that we became aware that a number of bridge officers had their binoculars trained back towards the land. It took us a while to realise that they weren’t looking at the port but rather up into the hills surrounding the city where we could – now that we knew what to look for and now that it was dark enough to spot – see orange flames. Our first thought, because of all the volcanoes in the region, was that we were seeing a distant eruption or magma flow and this seemed to be the case as we zoomed in on the photos I was taking and saw what seemed to be a ring of fire with occasional streams of it. However, as much as we’d love this to be true there simply aren’t any volcanoes in that area so it seems far more likely now that this was a wildfire in the hills. One day we’ll see a proper eruption. Hopefully, from a sensible distance.
With Star Princess finally setting off, I grabbed one more post-sunset photo in the waters off Nicaragua before the evening aboard the ship could commence.
Food And Drink Aboard Star Princess
We’d had a relatively late and relatively large lunch for us thanks to the cruise excursion to Mombacho and Granada so we opted for a late dinner once again (we probably would have anyway) and snatched up a couple of pre-dinner drinks in Vines and Crooners.
Dinner was as good as ever.
And the evening finished with a bit of people-watching (I’m sure there must have been some) and dancing (I’m sure there must have been some) and drinking (that we definitely did) in Skywalkers before the exertions of the day convinced us it was time for bed.
We had another couple of sea days ahead of us before the final new country for us on this South and Central American cruise, Mexico, all of which will be covered in the next few travel diary entries.