Honduras

Honduras is the second-largest country in Central America — 112,492 km², about 1.4 times Czechia — with roughly 10.6 million people, a long Caribbean coast, a short Pacific one on the Gulf of Fonseca, and a mountainous interior that occupies most of the middle. It borders Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua, and it is the only Central American country that touches all three of its neighbours' most difficult histories without having had a civil war of its own.

It has two UNESCO World Heritage sites, and they could hardly be more different. Copán is a Classic Maya city whose sculptors were, by a wide margin, the best in the Maya world — the carving there is three-dimensional in a way nothing at Tikal or Palenque approaches, and its Hieroglyphic Stairway carries the longest Maya text ever found. Río Plátano is a biosphere reserve of lowland rainforest in La Mosquitia, one of the largest surviving tracts in Central America, and it has been on the World Heritage in Danger list for most of the last three decades.

Offshore lies the second great asset: the Bay Islands — Roatán, Utila and Guanaja — sitting on the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef, the largest reef system in the Atlantic and the second largest on Earth. Utila has spent thirty years being one of the two or three cheapest places in the world to qualify as a scuba diver, and the islands are English-speaking, culturally Caribbean and only loosely attached to the mainland in the way people there think about themselves.

And then there is the phrase. "Banana republic" was coined about Honduras, in Honduras, by an American writer hiding here from an embezzlement charge — a genuinely accurate label at the time, and one the country has spent a century not being able to shake off. What is less well known is that bananas stopped being the main export a long time ago. Honduras today is Central America's largest coffee producer and one of the world's biggest.

Honduras means "depths" in Spanish. The traditional story has Columbus, on his fourth voyage in 1502, escaping a fortnight of storms off the north-east cape and saying "Gracias a Dios que hemos salido de esas honduras" — thanks be to God that we have come out of those depths — which is why the cape is called Cabo Gracias a Dios to this day. The anecdote is very likely a later embellishment; the name almost certainly refers plainly to the deep water off that coast. Either way, Honduras is one of the few countries named after a hydrographic observation.

Roughly 80% of Honduras is mountainous, and unlike its neighbours it has almost no active volcanoes — the Central American volcanic arc runs along the Pacific side, and Honduras only just touches the Pacific. What it has instead are old, eroded, heavily folded ranges of sedimentary and metamorphic rock, which is why Honduran mountains look nothing like the perfect cones of Guatemala or Nicaragua.

Honduras is tropical, but altitude and which coast you are on matter far more than the calendar. The country effectively runs three climates at once, and a trip that takes in Copán, Roatán and Tegucigalpa will need three different sets of clothes.

The short answer on when to go: February to April works for everything at once — dry in the highlands, clear underwater, and before the heat peaks. December and January are fine inland but are the wettest months on the north coast. Avoid September and October unless you are watching the forecast closely and are flexible.

Honduras is extraordinarily biodiverse for its size — cloud forest, lowland rainforest, pine savannah, mangrove and coral reef within a few hundred kilometres of each other — and it is losing that at a rate that puts it near the top of every deforestation table in the hemisphere. Both things are true at once and neither cancels the other.

Honduras sits between about 13° and 16° north, with Guatemala to the west, El Salvador to the south-west, Nicaragua to the south and east, and the Caribbean along the whole north. Tegucigalpa is in the middle of the highlands; San Pedro Sula is 240 km north-west in the Sula valley; Copán is on the Guatemalan border in the far west; Roatán is 60 km off the north coast.

Copán sits in a small green valley in the far west, twelve kilometres from the Guatemalan border, and it was never one of the biggest Maya cities. Tikal was bigger. Calakmul was more powerful. What Copán had was stone that could be carved — a fine local volcanic tuff — and several generations of sculptors who did things with it that nobody else in Mesoamerica managed.

The difference is immediately visible and does not require any expertise to see. Maya stelae elsewhere are carved in low relief; the figures are pressed into the surface. At Copán the rulers stand almost fully in the round, their headdresses undercut so deeply that you can put your hand behind them, their faces individual. Nothing at Palenque, Tikal or Chichén Itzá looks like this. The stelae in the Great Plaza are the reason the site is a World Heritage property and the reason it is worth crossing the country for.

Copán also produced one of archaeology's better lessons in humility. The valley's population was estimated at its peak at something over 20,000, and the collapse here has been studied in unusual detail: soil cores show erosion and deforestation on the valley slopes intensifying before the dynasty ended, and skeletal evidence shows worsening nutrition. It is not a simple story of drought or invasion, and Copán is one of the reasons the field stopped telling simple stories about the Maya collapse.

Columbus reached the Honduran coast on 30 July 1502, on his fourth and last voyage, landing near what is now Trujillo — where the first Catholic mass on the American mainland was said. Neither he nor anyone else did much with it for twenty years. The actual conquest came in the 1520s from two directions at once, and its early history is mostly Spaniards fighting each other: Cortés marched overland from Mexico in 1524–26 specifically to deal with a subordinate who had gone into business for himself.

Indigenous Honduras was not a single polity. The west was Maya and, further from Copán, Lenca and Ch'orti'; the centre and east were Lenca, Pech, Tolupán and Tawahka; the Caribbean lowlands were Miskito country. Resistance was accordingly local and prolonged rather than a single war — and it produced the national hero.

Central America declared independence from Spain on 15 September 1821 without a shot being fired — the news arrived from Guatemala City and was accepted. It was briefly annexed to the Mexican Empire, and when that collapsed in 1823 the region formed the Federal Republic of Central America: Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica, in a union that lasted fifteen years and has never stopped being mourned.

The phrase was coined here, and the story is precise enough to be worth telling properly. In 1896 an American bank teller and writer named William Sydney Porter was indicted for embezzlement in Austin, Texas. He fled to Honduras and spent several months in Trujillo, drinking with another American fugitive. He came home, served his sentence, and published under the name O. Henry. In 1904 he brought out Cabbages and Kings, a set of linked stories about a fictional Central American country called Anchuria, and in it he used the phrase "banana republic" for the first time.

The label stuck because it was accurate. From the 1890s the American fruit companies — United Fruit, Standard Fruit and Cuyamel — acquired vast concessions on the north coast, built the railways, ran the ports, issued their own scrip, imported their own labour and, when it suited them, chose the government.

In July 1969 Honduras and El Salvador fought a war lasting about 100 hours, in which somewhere between two and three thousand people were killed, most of them Honduran civilians. It is universally known as the Football War, and almost everything the name implies is wrong.

What actually happened: El Salvador was the most densely populated country on the American mainland and had almost no unclaimed land, because its own land was concentrated in very few hands. Over decades, perhaps 300,000 Salvadorans had crossed into far emptier Honduras and settled, many of them without title. In 1969 the Honduran government passed a land reform that redistributed land to Honduran peasants — and expelled Salvadoran squatters to do it. Tens of thousands were driven out, with real violence, and the press on both sides went to work.

In the 1980s every one of Honduras's neighbours was at war: civil war in El Salvador and Guatemala, the Sandinistas and the Contras in Nicaragua. Honduras did not have a war of its own. What it had instead was everybody else's — the country became, in the phrase of the period, the "USS Honduras": an unsinkable American aircraft carrier for the regional conflict.

Honduran politics over the last fifteen years is unusually dramatic even by Central American standards, and the outline is worth having because it explains a great deal about how the country is currently governed and how it is currently reported.

A note on how to read all this: it would be easy to conclude from the above that Honduras is ungovernable. What the record actually shows is a state that has repeatedly been captured — by fruit companies, by the army, by drug money — and a society that keeps producing the unions, journalists, prosecutors and voters who eventually pry it back. The conviction of a sitting-era president in a foreign court is a humiliation and also a fact that many countries have never managed to produce.

Around 10.6 million people, of whom roughly 90% are counted as mestizo — of mixed indigenous and European descent. The remaining tenth is where most of the country's cultural distinctiveness lives, and Honduras officially recognises nine indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples.

Two demographic facts shape modern Honduras more than any other. It is young — the median age is around 25 — and it is emigrating. Something on the order of a million Hondurans live in the United States, remittances are worth roughly a quarter of GDP, and the caravanas that made international news from 2018 onward were overwhelmingly Honduran. Almost every family has someone north, and the money they send is what keeps a very large number of households above water.

This is the most remarkable story in Honduras and it does not begin in Honduras. In the 1600s, on the island of St Vincent in the eastern Caribbean, shipwrecked and escaped West Africans mixed with the island's Kalinago and Arawak population. The result was a people — the Garífuna, or Black Caribs — who were never enslaved, who spoke an Arawakan language with Carib and African elements, and who held their island against the French and then the British for a century and a half.

The British finally defeated them in 1796 after a two-year war. Rather than enslave them, the British deported them: about 5,000 people were held on Baliceaux, where roughly half died, and the survivors were shipped across the Caribbean and put ashore on Roatán on 12 April 1797. There were about 2,000 of them. They moved to the mainland, spread along the coast, and their descendants now number several hundred thousand across Honduras, Belize, Guatemala and Nicaragua.

Handicraft is the everyday art form and it is regional: Lenca pottery from La Campa and Ojojona, with its distinctive black-on-cream painted designs; junco palm weaving from Santa Bárbara, which produces some of the best straw hats in Central America; wood carving from Valle de Ángeles; and Garífuna basketry and casabe graters on the coast. Buying directly in the villages costs less than buying in Tegucigalpa and puts the money where it belongs.

Honduras is majority Catholic — somewhere around half the population — with a very large and still growing evangelical Protestant minority, now approaching or exceeding forty per cent. That shift, common across Central America, has changed the country's politics as much as its Sundays, and evangelical churches are a serious force in Honduran public life.

Football is not a pastime in Honduras, it is the national temperature. The country has reached the World Cup three times — 1982 in Spain, 2010 in South Africa and 2014 in Brazil — which for a country of ten million against the strength of CONCACAF is a respectable record, and it has an intensity of domestic support out of proportion to its size.

Honduran food is the least internationally known of any Central American cuisine, and it does not deserve to be. It runs on three traditions that barely overlap: the highland mestizo kitchen of corn, beans, cream and grilled meat; the Garífuna kitchen of coconut milk, fish, cassava and plantain; and the Bay Islands' Caribbean cooking, which is closer to Jamaica than to Tegucigalpa.

Things worth ordering that nobody mentions: pastelitos de perro (fried corn turnovers with mince and potato — no dog is involved, the name is a mystery), catrachas (fried tortilla, beans, cheese), yuca con chicharrón, pollo con tajadas, pescado frito whole on the coast, and tamalitos de elote in the highlands when the young corn is in. On the Bay Islands: coconut bread, stewed fish, and conch in every form.

Honduras is Central America's largest coffee producer and sits among the top five or six in the world by volume — well ahead of Guatemala or Costa Rica, both of which have far better reputations. That gap is the story of Honduran coffee: for decades almost all of it left the country as anonymous bulk arabica to be blended, and the country got no credit for any of it.

That has been changing since the 2000s. Honduras now has six recognised growing regions — Copán, Opalaca, Montecillos, Comayagua, El Paraíso and Agalta — and Marcala, in La Paz, holds Central America's first coffee denomination of origin. Honduran lots win the Cup of Excellence outright and fetch specialty prices. Almost all of it is grown by smallholders on a hectare or two, in shade, at 1,200–1,700 m.

The site sits a kilometre outside the town of Copán Ruinas, which is one of the pleasantest small towns in Central America — cobbled, low, wrapped around a leafy plaza, and entirely geared to the ruins without having been ruined by them. Most people stay two nights and wish they had stayed three.

Practicalities: the site opens at 8:00 and the light and the temperature are both best in the first two hours. Guides wait at the entrance and a good one is worth taking — the inscriptions are meaningless without one. Copán Ruinas is 3 hours from San Pedro Sula by shuttle or bus, and it is also a short hop from Antigua Guatemala, which is how a large share of visitors arrive. The border at El Florido is straightforward.

The Bay Islands sit 50–70 km off the north coast on the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef — the largest reef system in the Atlantic and the second largest on Earth. The reef here comes very close to shore and drops off steeply, which means world-class diving is reachable from the beach and a boat ride is measured in minutes rather than an hour.

The mainland coast between Puerto Cortés and Trujillo is where most Hondurans go on holiday, and it is a very different proposition from the islands: hotter, greener, cheaper, Garífuna, and with rainforest coming down almost to the sand.

The eastern third of Honduras has no road connection to the rest of the country worth the name. La Mosquitia is rainforest, pine savannah, coastal lagoons and rivers, home to the Miskito, Pech, Tawahka and Garífuna, and it contains the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve — one of the last big pieces of Central American lowland rainforest and a World Heritage site since 1982.

The west is the part of Honduras that most visitors skip and the part that most rewards a slow week: cool colonial towns at 1,000–1,800 m, coffee country, Lenca villages, the highest mountain in the country and almost no other foreigners.

Tegucigalpa is not a beautiful city and it does not pretend otherwise. It is a mining town that became a capital, built into a bowl of hills at around 1,000 m, with a colonial core, a great deal of unplanned sprawl up the slopes, and a traffic problem that the geography makes insoluble. It also has the best museums in the country and a climate that is a relief after the coast.

Now the substance, because the reputation and the current reality have come apart. Around 2011–2012 Honduras had the highest murder rate in the world — roughly 86 per 100,000 nationally, and San Pedro Sula was repeatedly named the world's most violent city. Those numbers were real and that is where the reputation comes from.

They are also more than a decade old. The rate has fallen a long way since: to somewhere in the region of 30 per 100,000 in recent years — still very high by European standards, roughly forty times the Czech rate, and comparable to its regional neighbours rather than exceptional among them. Honduras is no longer the most dangerous country in the hemisphere and has not been for years. Both halves of that sentence matter.

There are no direct flights to Honduras from Europe. Every route involves at least one change, and the sensible options are through a US hub, through Panama City, through Mexico City, or through Madrid to a neighbouring Central American capital and onward.

Honduras is one of the cheapest countries in the Americas outside the Bay Islands, and one of the more expensive Caribbean islands on Roatán's west end. Budget for two different countries.

Emergency numbers: 911 covers police, fire and ambulance nationally. Most European countries do not have an embassy in Tegucigalpa and are accredited from Mexico City or Guatemala City — check where your own consular cover actually sits before you go, because it will not be in Honduras, and note the address of the nearest honorary consul.

Honduras is the Central American country people skip. Guatemala has Antigua and Tikal, Costa Rica has the brand, Belize has the reef and the English, Nicaragua has the volcanoes — and Honduras has a reputation from 2012 that has outlived the numbers behind it by more than a decade. That is a shame, because it holds the best Maya sculpture in existence, one of the world's cheapest places to learn to dive, a stretch of the second-largest barrier reef on the planet, and a coastal people whose ancestors are the only Africans in the Americas who were never enslaved.

It is also a country with real problems and this page has not soft-pedalled them: a former president serving 45 years in an American prison for cocaine trafficking, an environmental defender murdered in her home, a World Heritage rainforest on the danger list, and a quarter of the economy consisting of money sent home by people who left. None of that is decoration and none of it should be skipped in favour of the beaches.

But the honest summary for a traveller is straightforward. Go via San Pedro Sula. Give Copán two nights and take a guide. Spend a week on Utila or the quiet end of Roatán. Get to the Garífuna coast and eat something with coconut in it. If you have a second week, go west to Gracias and the Lenca towns, which almost nobody does. Move between cities by day, don't flash a phone, and check the current advisory before you book — that last one is not a Honduras-specific instruction, it is just one that matters more here than in Austria.

On the images

The photographs here are illustrative reconstructions rather than documentary images, and where one diverges from reality the caption says so and corrects it: Tegucigalpa's cathedral has one tower and not two; the reef in the diving picture is Indo-Pacific rather than Caribbean; the whale sharks are met in open water, not on a shallow reef; Chachahuate's houses stand on sand, not on stilts; the quetzals in La Tigra are a lucky day. Two further notes for the record. Two images this page's predecessor relied on — of Copán and of Roatán — are missing from the site's own storage and returned 404s, so a different Copán image is doing the work of the hero and there is no picture of Roatán at all. And one supplied recipe image of "baleadas" showed three tortillas rolled around minced beef, which is a burrito rather than the national dish; it was left out entirely rather than published with a caption explaining it away.