Leon

13th – 19th February


Lion of Leon

Leon – gently-fading, paint-peeling, left-leaning, Sandinista-supporting, heat-sweltering, Colonial-Spanish, ex-capital of Nicaragua.


Door Man


Door to Somewhere...once

We have had a very enjoyable few days here. In many ways it is just an ordinary small city with little major ‘pull’ to attract tourists. It is not a Granada or Antigua. And that is what is good about it. This means that people who live here either ignore you or treat you like anyone else without trying to sell you anything. Quite a few people randomly come up asking for a dollar and sometimes people stare for the novelty of seeing a gringo in town.

There are few major sites.


Viewing the Cathedral

The most obvious is the splendidly blocky cathedral is the largest in Central America and squats there like a manga sumo wrestler. It is tough and uncompromising, not graceful.


Nuns Gather at Night

What it is notable for are massive paintings of the Stations of the Cross inside, and four Atlas-like sculptures high up on the front supporting cross walls.


Bloody Heavy these Colonial Cathedrals

There are a few other interesting colonial churches, the yellow La Recollocion being the most architecturally beguiling and the 19th Century El Calvario being simply awful; a demented cross between Trumpton and Legoland. A small adobe church in the suburb of Sutiava is an interesting indigenous church.


Attendance at La Recollocion

The streets are almost invariably lined with colonial period single-storey buildings. All equivalent to those in Antigua yet peeling paint is testimony to the lack of funds for restoration and give a greater appeal for lived-in character. The theatre is a boldly coloured delight.


Leon Theatre


Drama Queen of Leon

Like many Central American colonial towns there is plenty of street life, from fruit and hot dog vendors to the tinkling bell alert of a hand-pushed ice cream cart or the Sunday special toy cars for children. The central park, outside the cathedral, is one of the best used we have seen so far. The market is enjoyable and a great place to buy your fruit, vegetables, tamales, tortillas and cheese. In Sutiava, the Casa de Queso is recommended for cheese-lovers.


Street Food


Bottle Shop in the Park

Our highlights, for very different reasons, are:

The Ortiz Art Foundation. A private family’s amazing collection of Latin American art, mostly Central American, from the 15th century to contemporary housed in two large, beautiful courtyard colonial houses. The collection is a major one by any means and holds one intriguing contemporary art piece after another that largely have clever techniques and sense of humour in common. Worth more than one visit.

The Sandinista tour and Sandinista memorials. You can read more of these below.

Lazybones Hostel. Perhaps the best accommodation we have yet stayed in on this trip. Two courtyards form the focal points for a relaxed and well-kept hostel that gets the right balance between easy-goingness, services and tranquillity. With a pool, free internet and WiFi, free tea and coffee (a blessing after the tea desert that is El Salvador) and a pleasant courtyard of rocking chairs below a grand mural aswell as the right attitude from the owners creating a peaceful, respectful clientele it is a lovely home-from-home. A double costs C$325 at the time of writing. Highly recommended!

The Cocinita Vegetarian Restaurant. Set in another lovely colonial building, the food is great. The only thing we had a problem with was what to do with the first large choice of meals for the first time. We’re used to having the ‘one’ thing on the menu we can eat! It took us a while to choose, overcome as we were with curry, tofu, falafels, gratin, pasta, gazpacho, etc, etc, etc… Everything we had was delicious. If you head towards it – don’t give up. It really is there despite the lack of life in the vicinity or obvious sign. Look for the large table in the entrance with the chess pieces – the table has two large chess boards built-in to it.

With the Sandinistas in Leon

Saturday 16th February

Check out photos from the tour on flickr here

We decided to take the Sandinista Tour of Revolutionary Leon this afternoon with a veteran combatant of the FSLN. We eventually parted after four hours walking around the war-torn monuments and places, the museums and memorials to thousands of brave individuals who had the commitment and passion to stand up against the military of a vicious dictatorship. Our guide was Dionisio, a quiet spoken man of humility yet conviction. In many ways there was a massive gulf between us. Here was a man who every night risked his life to man watch-towers, follow coded instructions and make bombs in the violent struggle against death camps, tanks and indiscriminate bombing. He could have been killed by the National Guard, Contras, or one of his own home-made bombs – as his younger brother was. While we have led very protected, privileged lives and are able to visit the country to find out something about the Sandinistas beyond The Clash album and the news of the Iran-Contra Affair.

Leon was the capital of the long-running revolution against dictatorship in Nicaragua. This left-leaning and poor university town has long been a centre for liberal thought and art. Opposition here was some of the strongest and involved a cadre of a few hundred armed combatants fighting an underground guerrilla war whilst supported by thousands of the population. Here fighting was sometimes street-by-street. Actions could be an assassination attack on a house of National Guard one night, the defence of a church against tanks the next. The FSLN – or Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional – was formed in 1961 to lead the fight against the dictatorship of the Somoza political dynasty. They took their name from the anti-Imperialist struggle of Augusto César Sandino during the 1930s.

Dionisio fought in the streets of Leon during the 1970s and is still an active member of the party, now in power again at last following the 2006 elections. He took us to the political prison, known as Prison 21 after the year it was built, where prisoners held 100 to a small room were regularly tortured with beatings, teeth filings, electric shocks and suspense upside down in water. It was all the more poignant when he only told of his two tortured stays in the political prison, but only after Georgia asked him. We saw two churches shelled by the military in the 1970s because the Sandinistas used the bell towers as watch towers. There is the street where four students were gunned down during a demonstration in 1959, the places they fell marked by four crosses painted on the road below a memorial. The courtyard building, then a social club, where the first of the three Somoza dictators was assassinated in 1956 by poet Rigoberto López Pérez disguised as a waiter. Near sunset we went to the Museum of Heroes and Martyrs which houses the photographs and some personal effects of people killed in the struggle. We ended at a the third mural on the tour which was painted in the 1990s to depict the history of Nicaragua from indigenous roots, via Conquistadors and the struggle to end with two children running hand-in-hand to a future Nicaragua of open land, lakes and mountains.

Perhaps the most eye-opening aspect of the tour was to spend time with someone who risked his life to fight fascism and could tell us his personal recollections of fearing the National Guard taking him during the day because of scratches on his arms and legs caused by crawling defensively on the ground and of fighting them at night at locations communicated by secret signs.

I recommend booking this tour which is easy. Go to the FLSN headquarters on the central park, opposite the cathedral and ask for Dionisio. The tour is $10 per person.