León – city of churches and revolution


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Published: February 15th 2011
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“No entiendo,” I smiled apologetically at the unshaven, be-vested skinny man in front of me.

He looked at me blankly.

“Momentito…” I had had an idea. I pulled out my Mexican Spanish phrasebook (originally acquired for a swine-’flu-kyboshed trip to that part of Central America two years’ earlier) and turned the pages looking for the “Accommodation” section.

“Umm… ¿Puedo verla?” I looked up hopefully.

“Si, si,” he replied (somewhat to my astonishment – he’d understood me!) and led me down the path. I peered into the room he pointed out, and finally understood what he’d been trying to tell me at the outset. Yes, they did have a room, but it hadn’t been cleaned yet. Then, rightly doubting my understanding of Spanish numbers, he pointed to a handwritten notice on the back of the door: this clean, well-equipped, en suite room, with fully-functioning electricity and water, its door opening onto the bougainvillea-filled garden, was going to cost me the princely sum of US$7 per night.

I was on the road again. Properly. On my own. Me, myself and I. Much though I had enjoyed the road trips with Amy and her son (and we were to do one more before they left Nicaragua), there is a freedom to travelling on my own that I have struggled to match with even the best of travel companions. Having lost my Nica-bus-virginity with a simple trip to the zoo the day before, I felt like an old hand by the time I had reached the correct one of Managua’s three main bus stations, and then located a second minibus to take me up to the capital of Nicaragua’s northwest, León.

Self-styled “Ciudad Heroica, Primera Capital De La Revolución”, according to the plaque at the Mausoleo de Héroes y Mártires, León is proud of its role in the downfall of the hated and dictatorial Somoza clan who dominated Nicaraguan politics for more than forty years. The Mausoleo is across the road from the Cathedral, close to the city’s Parque Central. I had no sooner reached it on my first sortie into town than an old lady came up to me, eager to explain the history of the “revolution” and the elaborate murals that cover the adjacent walls. I demurred, pointing out my limited Spanish, so she contented herself with selling me a couple of postcards instead.

There’s a first for my experience in this country: postcards. León is on what passes for a tourist trail here, and this is one consequence. And just after I’d told my mother there wasn’t a hope in Hades of my finding a postcard for her collection on this trip. It took me a little longer to locate the post office – further testing my Spanish with a halting “Donde la oficia de cortes?”, getting the gist of the first direction, then stopping to ask someone else for the next one - but, by the next day, a dozen scribbled and stamped postcards were in the “internacional” box. Who knows where they’ll be by now…

In any event, politics continues to play a big role here. Unlike other erstwhile Sandinista strongholds in the north of the country, León is strongly pro-Ortega, the impressively self-reinvented erstwhile-revolutionary-now-president-second-time-around with his extraordinary political staying power (he stood in every election between 1990 and 2006 before finally winning office again). Graffiti proclaiming “Daniel Presidente 2012-2017” is daubed confidently on walls around the centre of town. Received wisdom is that November’s elections are a foregone conclusion given Ortega’s apparent stranglehold on the media and the election process, I’m told. Ranged against him are an uneasy combination of interests and parties, from conservatives to the hardcore Sandinistas who resent Ortega for, as they see it, selling himself out in his obsession to win office once again.

For the tourists – and it was strange to encounter fellow “gringos”, another first for my time in this country – León’s attractions range from the historical and architectural, to the gastronomic, to the adrenalin-inducing. The natural world is close at hand too, with the mangrove swamps and lagoons of the Reserva Natural Isla Juan Venado only a short drive and a longer paddle away, but León’s most impressive feature for me is its surroundings. Looking a little surprised and out of place, unaccompanied by lesser hills which might break up the plains at their feet, the still-smoking volcanoes of the Cordillera de los Maribos rise up out of the land, stretching out in both directions, south-east and north-west of the city. I had become a little obsessed with Volcán Momotombo, which in its singularity and simplicity dominates the Managua skyline, a child’s version of a mountain, symmetrically triangular in shape. As the minibus took me closer to León, first Momotombo’s own offspring, the identikit but smaller Momotombito, an island in the northern end of the lake, and then its siblings began to raise their heads, the main contingent stretching out for sixty kilometres or so. A distant cousin, the formerly-explosive Volcán Cosigüina, occupies the eponymous peninsula in the far north-west, overlooking the Gulf of Fonseca and neighbouring Honduras and El Salvador. (Its 1835 eruption, during which the volcano allegedly blew half her height, is considered the Americas’ most violent since colonisation.) Sadly, I didn’t have time to tackle the ascent of any of them (nor the descent, “volcano-boarding”, of one, Cerro Negro), but I did clamber up the steeply precarious steps to the roof of the cathedral for a panoramic view like no other. Alone on the roof at 8.30 am, with clear blue skies and a warming sun, I walked slowly around, drinking in the drama of the backdrop to this old colonial city.

León is petitioning to be allowed to call itself “the City of Churches”. And it certainly boasts a fair number, the pièce de résistance being its cathedral, the Basilica de la Asunción, which, it is said, León acquired with some degree of subterfuge. The original architectural plans, so the story goes, were actually intended for Lima in Peru. Somehow the two sets of plans were switched so that León now boasts a cathedral of perhaps more extravagance than even its erstwhile status as the country’s capital for more than two centuries merited. Strangely, I found it difficult to get inside many of the churches, even on a Sunday. The cathedral finally opened its doors in the early afternoon (was God having a lie-in?), but a couple of the other “headline” churches, the asymmetrical and richly yellow Iglesia de La Recolección and the main-street dominating, un-succinctly named Iglesia Dolce Nombre de Jesús El Calvario, remained resolutely closed.

A kilometre or so down the road is León’s now Siamese twin, the erstwhile indigenous township of Subtiava. And it still feels different. Only annexed officially to León in 1902, it’s a quieter, more homely part of town. Gringos don’t often make it this far, and people are peacefully going about their daily life. I went there in search of an ocean-fix. I had been nearly three weeks in a country that borders two major bodies of sea water, and I hadn’t yet seen either. In a side street off Subtiava’s market, I – together with my companions’ chunky packages of provisions and piñatas and suitcases – boarded a local bus to take me out to Poneloya, the undeveloped one of the pair of beaches most accessible from León. Driving out through maize and banana plantations, and through a near continuous succession of villages, we left the volcanoes behind. On our way down the hill from the Las Peñitas junction, I caught my first sight of the Pacific. Strange to think that the last time I saw this ocean was an unimaginable distance away, from the shores of Mona Vale beach in Sydney’s northern suburbs on a rainy November afternoon. Here it was very different, a grey, volcanic tinge to the sand, and a near-deserted beach, only a quartet of young lads messing about in the surf, stopping to stare at the unexpected manifestation of a gringo right here. Round the corner, at the head of an inlet, I found locals cooling off in the water, preparing boats for fishing later in the day, and playing football on the beach as the tide slowly crept in. And off to one side, I found an even more attractive feature: a thatched café/restaurant, its balcony overlooking the inlet. For the three hours I was there, I was their sole customer, luxuriating in the tranquillity of the setting, the smell of the sea, and my distance from the hustle of Nicaraguan town life… oh, and my deliciously chilled Toña beer and crunchy plantain tostades. Managua seemed a wonderfully long way away.


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