Managua

Managua is the capital of Nicaragua, on the southern shore of Lake Managua in the west of the country. Its name is usually traced to a Nahuatl phrase for a place by the water, and the lake beside it also keeps its older name, Xolotlán.

People crossed this shore on foot long before the Spanish came: the Footprints of Acahualinca, left in volcanic mud and later buried under ash, lie under a small museum in the north of the city. In the colonial period Managua was a fishing village of the Chorotega people, and in 1819 the Spanish crown raised it to a town as the Leal Villa de Santiago de Managua. It became the capital in 1852, a middle choice between the old rivals León and Granada, which had each wanted the title. After the earthquakes of the 20th century much of the old center was left open, and the city was rebuilt in districts to the south and east.

Compañía Cervecera de Nicaragua brews Toña and Victoria beer in Managua. Grupo Pellas, the family group behind Flor de Caña rum and the San Antonio sugar mill, has its head office in the city. Café Soluble, founded in Managua, makes Presto instant coffee from beans grown in the northern highlands of Jinotega and Matagalpa.

The Old Cathedral of Santiago was built in the 1920s and 1930s around a steel frame shipped from Belgium. Next to the lake, the Rubén Darío National Theatre carries the name of the poet from Metapa who led Spanish-language modernism. The Metropolitan Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, designed by the Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta, opened in the 1990s with a roof of 63 small domes. Tiscapa Lagoon fills a volcanic crater in the middle of the city, and a steel silhouette of Augusto César Sandino stands on the hill above its rim.