San Salvador

San Salvador is the capital of El Salvador, a city in a valley at the foot of the San Salvador Volcano in the center of the country. It is named after the Holy Savior, the patron of both the city and the country. Each August the Fiestas Agostinas honor the patron with a procession, a fair and a week of public holidays.

The Spanish founded the town in 1525 under Gonzalo de Alvarado, a relative of the conquistador Pedro de Alvarado, and moved it to its present valley in the following decades. It grew as the center of a province that traded indigo dye to Spain. In 1811 the priest José Matías Delgado led the first call for independence in Central America from the city. San Salvador was the capital of the Federal Republic of Central America in the 1830s, and after the federation broke up it became the capital of El Salvador. Earthquakes struck it many times, and each time it was rebuilt on the same site.

Industrias La Constancia brews Pilsener and Suprema beer and bottles soft drinks in the city. Grupo Poma, based in San Salvador, sells cars through Excel Automotriz and builds hotels and shopping centers. Coffee from the volcanic slopes around the valley, grown in the shade of taller trees, is roasted and exported through the city.

The Metropolitan Cathedral holds the tomb of Saint Óscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador canonized by Pope Francis. The National Palace, finished in the 1910s, was built in neoclassical style with materials shipped from Europe. The Teatro Nacional, opened in the same decade, has a French Renaissance front and a painted ceiling by Carlos Cañas. El Boquerón, a national park on the summit of the volcano, has a trail around the rim of a deep crater with a small cone at its bottom.