OLIVER SMITH is senior features writer at
Lonely Planet Traveller and was last year
named AITO Travel Writer of the Year.I
T IS GRADUATION DAY IN León,
and students gather outside
the whitewashed face of the
cathedral. In the cool reaches
of the nave, parents mingle with
tutors, watched over by marble saints
and relics brought across the Atlantic from
Spain half a millennium ago. Outside,
loudspeakers turned up to seismic volume
blast pop music across squares full of
revellers, rattling the iron shutters of
shop fronts and threatening to loosen
the terracotta roof tiles above.
Like The Godfather Part II, The Empire
Strikes Back and Terminator 2: Judgment
Day, a sequel can surpass the original –
and this is most definitely the case with
the Nicaraguan city of León. Founded in
1524 as the country’s first capital, León
was initially renowned as a pit of Old
Testament-style vice – ruled by tyrants
with an appetite for money grabbing and
massacring indigenous locals. And sure
enough, in true Old Testament-style,
León was destroyed and buried under
ash by a volcanic eruption in 1610.
León ‘take two’ was relocated some
15 miles up the road, and four centuries
later lives a far happier life as a bookish
and boisterous university city. Its colonial
architecture is more ramshackle than
Granada’s: its pastel-coloured bungalows
topped with a tangled mass of telephone
lines, its streets adorned with satirical
political graffiti. Dotted about the city are
bullet holes and bomb damage sustained
during the Nicaraguan Revolution in
the 1970s – when León’s students led a
rebellion against the repressive Somoza
dictatorship. Portraits of revolutionary
martyrs are hung proudly on walls across
the city, annual parades commemorate
demonstrations in which students were
massacred, and the small Museum of the
Revolution pays tribute to the lost.
Through the day, locals pick their way
around markets piled high with fruit
- León
Head to Nicaragua’s original capital city
to read deep into the country’s poetic soul
Occupying a colonial mansion a five-minute
walk north of the city centre, Hotel La Perla has
comfortable whitewashed rooms and leafy
courtyards (from US$81; laperlaleon.com).
To find out more about the political upheaval of
1970s Nicaragua, pay a visit to León’s Museum of
the Revolution (US$1.25; Parque Central). The
Rubén Darío Museum is set in the poet’s childhood
home (US$1.25; Calle de Rubén Darío).Essentials
and vegetables. Evenings see students
idling outside the cathedral, beside
a fountain guarded by four growling
stone lions. Wherever you go, a chain of
volcanoes still forms a (now fortunately
more distant) backdrop to León’s
crumbling colonial grandeur.
‘León is Nicaragua’s city of books,’
says Alberto Alvarez Oporta Cruz,
a secondhand bookseller selling crinkly
volumes in the town square, looking to
pick up more stock from departing
students. ‘León is our country’s cradle
of poetry – we have so much to inspire
poets here.’
Across Latin America, Nicaragua has
a reputation as a country of poets: a place
where skilled bards are revered as rock
stars, and where everyone, from primary
school pupils to the president, pens their
own verses. In León it’s not uncommon
to see students selling printouts of their
compositions to passers-by.
Alberto’s favourite poet and León’s
most famous son lies not far away, buried
beneath a statue of a more sorrowful stone
lion in the Cathedral. Rubén Darío is
revered as the Nicaraguan Shakespeare: by
the time he was 10 he had read the whole
of Don Quixote. By the time he died, aged
49, his verses could be recited across the
Spanish-speaking world. One of the city’s
proudest possessions is his old home –
now a museum, housing his bible and the
four-poster bed where he breathed his last.
Come nightfall, the post-graduation
celebrations gather momentum. Streets
are closed down, bottles of beer are
glugged, stages are assembled, bands play
music and poets read commemorative
verses to appreciative crowds. The party
doesn’t end until the morning sun colours
the sky beyond the easterly volcanoes, by
which time it’s hard to disagree with the
verses inscribed on Rubén Darío’s stone
tomb: ‘Nicaragua is created of vigour and
glory. Nicaragua is made for freedom.’Looking east from the top
of the cathedral, volcanoes
dominate León’s horizon