F
OUND IN POCKETS, CASH
tills and stuffed down sofas
across Nicaragua is the 100
córdoba note (about US$3.15),
showing the Cathedral of
Granada, presiding over the nation’s most
handsome city. Turn the note over and
you’ll see the other famous symbol of
Granada – a horse-drawn carriage and its
grinning driver, clip-clopping along the
city’s cobbled streets.
The horses, the carriage and the grin all
belong to Mauricio Sanchez – himself part
of the long tradition of Granada carriage
drivers. One day Mauricio looked up
from a handful of change to see his own,
moustached face smiling back at him,
the depiction copied from a photo taken
by a tourist a few years ago.- Granada
Wander the wide cobblestone boulevards and linger in
the churches of Nicaragua’s phoenix-like colonial city
Hotel Dario is a colonial-era hotel with
an imposing mint-green front just south of the
cathedral. Rooms with ceiling fans and timber
furniture are arranged around two elegant
Andalucian-style courtyards (from US$81;
hoteldario.com).
Horse-drawn carriages can be hired from
the Parque Central – an hour-long tour takes
in all the churches and the waterfront park by
Lake Nicaragua (from US$12.50).Essentials
From Granada, it’s an hour’s bus ride to San Jorge to
catch the hour-long ferry to Ometepe Island.g‘Granada is the city Nicaraguans are most
proud of,’ he explains, parked among the
laurel trees in the central square, scouting
for customers to take on an afternoon tour.
‘It is the oldest city in Central America, and
it has a history that makes everyone feel
romantic. Sometimes, when I have people
in the back of my carriage, I wish it didn’t
make them quite so romantic!’
Whether seen on foot or from the back of
a carriage, Granada’s architectural harmony
is apt to prompt profound reactions; a
refined antidote to the sprawling
megacities of Central America. Jumping on
the carriage, the wheels soon rattle beneath
the duck-egg-blue façade of the Iglesia San
Francisco and the off-white Iglesia de la
Merced – churches both originally built
in the 1500s, their foundations laid not so
long after Columbus spied the New World
through his telescope. Inside, people
shuffle up creaking staircases to the top of
bell towers for views over the rooftops of
the city: villas with shuttered windows,
courtyards with gurgling fountains and
old tobacco factories in the distance. The
carriage passes squares where locals picnic
on lunches of cassava and pork rinds
served at little kiosks, sitting beside statues
of Nicaraguan poets with sparrows perched
on their learned heads.
Rather surprisingly, Granada has the
moniker ‘The Great Sultan’ – the Spanish
settlers intending to build a tribute to the
city’s Moorish namesake over the Atlantic
in the Old World. But what’s even more
surprising is that Granada exists at all. In
1665, Welsh pirate Henry Morgan sailed to
Granada on one especially swashbuckling
raid, paddling canoes up the San Juan
River by night and sneaking across Lake
Nicaragua. He did what any self-respecting
pirate would do when confronted with
a city of exquisite beauty after a long,
exhausting and miserable journey: he
burnt it to the ground. There followed three
more pirate raids along similar lines, and a
conquest by maverick American
adventurer William Walker in the 1850s – a
man who proclaimed himself President of
Nicaragua, and, when this didn’t go down
so well, left the embers of the city with a
sign reading ‘Here was Granada’.
By the time Mauricio has set out on hislast trot, the scorching afternoon heat gives
way to a gentle breeze. Evening crowds stroll
beneath the wrought-iron lampposts and
acacia trees, beside the peeling stuccoed
façades of barbers’ shops and Granada’s
long-closed railway station, where steam
engines have been rusting at the platform for
decades. Games of baseball strike up by the
shores of Lake Nicaragua and the last rays of
sun disappear from the highest spires of the
city. Morgan, Walker and various others
failed to appreciate that Granada’s habit of
getting destroyed was matched only by its
habit for rebuilding itself – bigger and more
beautiful than before.Carriage driver Mauricio Sanchez