León

The trip to León was already mentioned as our first microbus experience and, other than my precarious, somewhat uncomfortable perch on top of the engine, it was a very pleasant trip.  The bus station in León is perhaps the most chaotic station that I’ve seen in Nicaragua—maybe the most chaotic place I’ve ever been.  In addition to the usual vendors and buses, the addition of 10 or 15 minibuses constantly loading/unloading/arriving/departing adds considerably to the traffic confusion, plus the station has no central focus, no departure board and the passenger seating area is cramped and noisy.  The bus also approached the station with numerous turns down incredibly rough streets (equivalent to some in the country), so one is a bit disoriented by the time one finally gets to the station.  We tried to get our bearings (not quite as easy in the tropics where the sun is almost overhead around noon) and walked through several blocks of equally chaotic market stalls heading towards the city center.  Finally, we reached the “normal” (non-market) streets and were able to reconnoiter and arrive at the hotel (about 1 km from the station).   We arrived before normal check-in, but gratefully could drop off the bags, having the rest of the day to start exploring León.

Here are some shots of the hotel where we stayed, called Casona Colonial.  From the outside it looks much like any other building, but many building here are misleading in that there is often a beautiful interior courtyard.  It’s also striking how the outdoors and indoors are really one in the same in tropical areas.  (I’ve already mentioned this phenomenon when discussion my life in Sabana Grande.)  Here you can see that the living room and outdoors are literally a continuum.

León background.  León is one of two, principal colonial cities in Nicaragua (the other being Granada) and was the first capital, and if fact was the capital for over 200 years.  (Actually, this first capital was in León Viejo, located about 20 km south on the banks of Lake Managua.  Old León was abandoned (and current León founded) in 1610 after earthquake/volcano devastation.  Old León is currently an archeological site but we didn’t get to go there.)  For much of the 19th century, León and Granada struggled for supremacy and eventually, the compromise was that Managua became the capital.  León was associated with the Liberal Party and Granada with the Conservative Party, but the names don’t have much to do with what those terms mean in the US today.  León was also a Sandanista hotbed throughout the 1960s and 70s, seeing much fighting and considerable damage in the late 70s, but with lethal confrontations dating all the way back to the 50s (including the assassination of Somoza I).   

Some murals depicting some of León’s more revolutionary past.  The top two are parts of the same mural and show Edgar “The Cat” Mungía, an abstract of a confrontation between troops and students, the four student martyrs from the July 1959 protest (sort of a Nicaraguan Kent State), and finally, the ever-present figure of Sandino.  Of course, there is also selling going on!  The bottom photo is interesting as it depicts the violent incident from 1959, but the current activity is painting lines on a basketball court for enjoyment and recreation.  The partial mural that is cut off has an AIDS prevention message.

Today León is Nicaragua’s 2^nd biggest city and seems to be a very busy, energetic  place with almost every door in many neighborhoods seemingly selling something—clothing, cell phones, shoes, snacks, haircuts...—and virtually every shop had something displayed on the typically narrow sidewalks (in particular, more mannequins than I’ve ever seen—I  even saw a billboard advertising mannequins).  The streets are filled with cars, trucks, buses, trucks used as buses, motorcycles, bicycles and horse carts and there are pedestrians everywhere.  León is known as an intellectual center with several universities and many students.  While there are many very attractive old buildings, there are also many that are in great need of rehabilitation.   León has a large array of 17th, 18th and 19th century churches, interesting museums, a beautiful theater, proximity to Pacific beaches, and several nearby volcanoes for hiking or even “cinder surfing” or “sand boarding) (a sport invented on Cerro Negro, a cinder cone volcano that only appeared in 1850, in which you can “surf” or “sled” down the volcano on boards similar to surf or snow boards)—certainly there is more than enough to fill up the couple of days we had.

At the risk of getting a reputation and some kind of mannequin pervert, here are a couple of typical shots of sidewalk scenes.  By the way, the woman on the left at the top is read.  The “bottom” photo is especially for the Ebert side of the family as it is a rather impressive butt shot.

A couple of common street scenes in León.  At the top is a horse cart.  This one is pretty much along, but they typically mix with all kinds of motorized traffic.  The bottom photo is of one of the truck-buses.  They’re a bit cheaper than regular buses, but we never ventured onto one, if for no other reason than you can’t look ahead and anticipate where to get off.

Add captionA picture of the recently-restored theater named for the León composer José de la Cruz Mena.  He had leprosy and was not allowed to attend the debut performance of one of his compositions in this very theater and reportedly was in tears listening to it from outside.

Our stay can basically be divided into churches, museums and the beach.  We started with the Cathedral (Basilica de la Asunción), which is the largest (and reportedly grandest) church in Central America.  (There is an unsubstantiated legend that the plans for the cathedral were inadvertently switched with Lima, Peru, and that explains the side of the church in the relative backwater of León.)  It was begun in 1747 on the site of 2 previously-destroyed churches and took 113 years to complete.  For C$20 (about a dollar), we climbed to the roof for a nice panorama of León.  Also in the cathedral is the tomb of Rubén Darío, León’s (and Nicaragua’s) most famous son.  

Exterior and interior shots of the Basilica de la Asunción, Leon's cathetral.  The exterior shot is from the park across the street from the church.

A couple of shots from the cathedral roof.  In each one you can see both another church and a volcano.  The spacing to the nearby churches is fairly typical—you generally don’t need to walk more than a few blocks to find another church.

We saw most of León’s churches from the outside (all facing west, by the way, so morning shots are always backlit), but missed several interiors because of not being there at the opportune time, and also missed several of the farther-outlying ones, so these photos only  represent a sample of what is in León.  It would be a great place for a walking tour with someone knowledgeable about history and architecture, but our guide books were rather cursory, so ours was a less in-depth experience.  

A composite of four of León’s churches.  Starting clockwise from the upper left:  San Juan de Diós, San Nicolás de Laborío, San Juan Bautista and San Filipe.

A similar composite of five  more churches.  Again, starting clockwise from the upper left:  El Calvario, La Merced, Zaragoza, San Francisco and La Recolección.

A few representative interior scenes with the same order:  El Calvario, San Filipe, San Juan de Diós and San Juan Bautista.

There are a couple of church ruins as well.  One from a war in the mid-19^th century and this one, San Sebastian, from the war against the Somozas.  The bust is of José de la Cruz Mena (after whom the theater is named).  Similarly to the theater story, the bust is placed within earshot outside the church because he was not allowed to enter and could only listen from afar.

The buses to the beach leave from the neighborhood of Sutiava, and indigenous community that still tries to preserve many of its traditions.  It has the only indigenously-run museum in Nicaragua, but it was unfortunately closed when we were there.  However, the church was open so we added one more to our collection and we also wandered a few blocks to see the remains of the tamarind tree (called El Tamarindón) from which the last, great chief Adiac was hanged by the Spaniards for challenging Spanish authority.

On the left, the Iglesia Parroquial de San Juan Bautista de Sutiava, both outside and inside.  The inside is decorated for lent.  Holy week in Sutiave is very colorful with “sawdust paintings” on the streets.  These are similar to sand paintings, but the medium is apparently much more difficult.  The right shows what’s left of the Tamarindón, from which Adiac was hung.

And speaking of buses to the beach…  We spent a half day at the beach in Las Peñitas, about a 45-minute bus ride from León.  Although I’m not a fan of beaches or water, the beach was very nice and very uncrowded. (Apparently on the weekends and especially over Holy Week, it will get a bit more crowded.)  It’s a black, volcanic sand beach and the wind and surf were both fairly strong (and apparently the undertow is also very wicked in places).  In fact, the blowing sand stung the legs at times if you were higher up where the sand was drier.  Without a local hotel, there are no facilities for washing off or changing, so we just waded (actually, I found a rock overhang and sat in the shade most of the time—Susan waded).  We had a seafood lunch at the little restaurant before heading back to León.

A few beach scenes at Las Peñitas.  This is not the best surfing in Nicaragua, but under the right conditions it can be decent here.  If you like beaches to yourself, this is the place (at least on weekdays).

For museums, we don’t have as many photos because either a) photography was not allowed or b) the material did not lend itself to photography.  León has a very nice art museum that is actually run by a private foundation called the Fundación Ortiz-Guardián.  Works ranges from pre-Columbian (both European and Western Hemisphere) up to very modern pieces, such as interactive computer installations or I-phone art.  In addition to the art, the museum is housed in classic colonial-era home.  Another museum of historical significance is the Rubén Darío museum and archive, located in the house where the poet lived as a boy.  Coincidentally, another significant Nicaraguan poet named Alfonzo Cortés also lived here but went mad and was later committed to an asylum.  Neither of these museums allowed photography, but I would have liked to have recorded some of the art work in particular.  A third museum was the Galería de Héroes and Mártires, a moving museum honoring those who died in the struggle to liberate Nicaragua from the Somozas.  León and its students were a hotbed of Sandinista support and it suffered considerably not only with deaths, but also with damage to the city.  It covers not just the 1978-79 period, but includes the student martyrs from 1959 and goes through the Contra war in the 1980s.  It is run by mothers of the fallen and is mostly simple pictures, but includes a few artifacts as well.  

The top photo shows the exterior of the Rubén Darío Museum and Archive, about 4 or 5 blocks west of the cathedral.  It gives a history of his life and also had mementos from his life and a library of books both by and about him.  At the bottom is his tomb inside the Cathedral.

The museum where we could take photos was the Museo de Leyendas y Tradiciones, an interesting juxtaposition of fairy tales and torture.  The museum is located in an old Somoza prison called 21 (it was built in 1921) and was the site of much of the torture carried out the Guardia Nacional.  The museum contains hand-made models of various Nicaraguan legends and traditions, not all of which are light-hearted, but on the background walls are painted representations of who lived in the cells an some of the activities that went on behind these walls.  The entry courtyard contains murals, statues and an old tank.  The museum is all the work of a recently-deceased 90-year-old woman named Doña Carmen Toruño, who personally made the figures and funded the museum.  At the end we also could walk around the walls where the guards were posted and see their vantage point.  This place gave me approximately the same feeling I had at Dachau when I was in college—it’s almost eerie to separated from the horrors of a place only by the dimension of time.  It makes one grateful that time only travels in one direction and it’s impossible to “slip” backwards. (The second law of thermodynamics, of course!)

One of the displays in the Legends and Traditions museum with a drawing of prison beds on the wall.  The large woman here represents a Spanish lady and the little man with the big heat (big head because much smarter than the Spanish woman) is indigenous.  (We saw this particular story danced to a drum accompaniment in Granada—looking for money, of course.)

The statue to the unknown combatant at the entrance to the prison-turned-museum.  The guards’ walkway is seen at the top of the wall.

A composite of several photos from the museum.   On the top left are pictures of methods of torture (the guide also described some of the other techniques and unfortunately, my Spanish was good enough to understand) and at the bottom left are the water basins in which prisoners were dunked while suspended from their feet until they started to inhale water.  (Sounds like and enhanced interrogation technique to me!)  The top right is the outline of where the prisoners’ chapel was located.  It’s reassuring that the spiritual needs were being attended to during the torture.  Finally, a few of the mosaics in the outer courtyard.  The two on the left are prison scenes, but he one on the left adamantly declares “No more Somozas!”