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SAN PEDRO SULA |
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 Honduras's second city, and the country's driving economic force,
SAN PEDRO SULA sprawls across the fertile Valle de Sula at the foot of
the Merendón mountain chain, just an hour from the coast. Flat and
uninspiring to look at, and for most of the year uncomfortably hot and
humid, this is a city for getting business done in rather than
sightseeing. It's also the transport hub for northern and western
Honduras, meaning that a visit here is usually unavoidable, even if only
to pass through. On a more positive note, in terms of facilities San
Pedro rates alongside Tegucigalpa, with its own international airport,
foreign consulates, and a wide range of hotels, restaurants and shopping
outlets - travellers coming from the north rarely need to visit the
capital. If you do choose to stick around for a day or two, it's not
difficult to organize a trip out to one of the country's finest
cloudforest reserves , the Parque Nacional El Cusuco.
One of the first Spanish settlements in the country, founded by Pedro de
Alvarado in 1536, today's San Pedro bears almost no trace of its pre-twentieth-century
incarnation. Burnt out by French corsairs in 1660 and virtually
abandoned during a yellow-fever epidemic in 1892, the city struggled to
maintain a population of more than five thousand, and today only a few
wooden buildings remain as proof of its long past. Fortunes began to
rise with the growth of the banana industry in the late nineteenth
century, when the city rapidly cemented its role as Honduras's
commercial centre. With its outer reaches continuing to sprout factories,
many of them foreign-owned, and a population now in the region of
600,000, San Pedro ranks as one of the fastest-growing cities in Central
America.
The City
San Pedro Sula's Parque Central, the large and recently re-paved Parque
Barahona , is the focus of the city centre, teeming with vendors,
shoeshine boys, moneychangers and general malcontents taking the air. On
its eastern edge, the...
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