Central America

Centroamérica

Six small countries between Mexico and Colombia, built around the same square: church on one side, town hall on another, shops and a café on the other two, and everybody knows to meet there without arranging it. Most of the region says vos rather than tú, and nomás for "just"; Costa Ricans answer everything with pura vida.

Guatemala is the heart of the living Maya world: about six million people speak some thirty Maya languages, K'iche' above all, and at the market of Chichicastenango a weaver sells a huipil that took three months on a backstrap loom while copal smoke rises on the church steps. Honduras has Copán, the ruined city two travellers bought for fifty dollars in 1839; Costa Rica has two seasons instead of four and a cloud forest where the quetzal lives.

History

History of Central America: a timeline (11 moments of its history)

Start with

  • c. 250–900: The Classic Maya: Tikal, Palenque and the collapse — From about AD 250 to 900 dozens of Maya kingdoms flourished in the lowlands of Guatemala, Belize, Chiapas and Yucatán.
  • 29 September 1513: Balboa reaches the Pacific — Vasco Núñez de Balboa, leader of the settlement of Santa María la Antigua del Darién, set out on 1 September 1513 with Spaniards and Indigenous guides to cross…
  • 1535: The Viceroyalty of New Spain is created — Fourteen years after the fall of Tenochtitlan, Charles V replaced the quarrelling conquerors and the first Audiencia with a viceroy, a 'vice-king' who…
  • c. 1568: Bernal Díaz writes his True History — Bernal Díaz del Castillo, born in Medina del Campo in the 1490s, sailed with Cortés in 1519 and fought through the conquest of Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras.
  • 17 December 1819–17 November 1831: Gran Colombia, Bolívar's republic — On 17 December 1819 the Congress of Angostura passed the Fundamental Law that united Venezuela and New Granada in a single Republic of Colombia; the province…
  • 15 September 1821: Central America declares independence — Central America won independence without a war.
  • 15 August 1914: The Panama Canal opens — The United States, having backed Panama's separation from Colombia in November 1903, signed the Hay–Bunau-Varilla treaty with the new republic's French envoy:…
  • 7 August 1987: Esquipulas II: peace for Central America — By the mid-1980s Central America was at war with itself: the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua fought US-backed contras, guerrillas fought the army in El…

Culture

Culture of Central America

Everyday life

  • The market at Chichicastenango — Thursday and Sunday in the Guatemalan highlands: buying a huipil that took three months to weave, bargaining without insulting the weaver, copal smoke on the church steps, and a stallholder who switches between two languages.

Identity and society

  • The Maya, then and now — Pyramids above the jungle, a real writing system, the zero and the calendar; and the six million people who speak some thirty Maya languages today, whose ancestors two travellers in 1839 proved had built it all.

Literature and storytelling

Places and landscapes

History

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