City walk
Trip Start
Jan 16, 2008
1
30
35
Trip End
Apr 19, 2008
Where I stayed
Hospedjare Cocibolca
Granada, Nicaragua
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Interesting things they found when they were restoring the church as well. While they were redoing the floor, they discovered old graves which carbon dating puts to being indigenous peoples from a while back. Seems that when the Spanish missionaries arrived, they really worked to get rid of the local religion, even to the extent of building churches on old graveyards. Guess it's more or less the same as taking over pagan festivals and turning them into christian holy days, just a little more down to earth.
Aside from that, we saw a couple of other old churches, which have great facades. Oh, did I mention that behind the gorgeous facades of the buildings here, they hide wonderful courtyard gardens? It's great, you go into a restaurant (for example) and end up sitting in the garden to eat. How cool is that?
Made it down to the lake as well. Granada sits on Lago de Nicaragua as well, so it's unfortunately the same brown mass of water as on Isla de Omtepe, with the added touch of big city pollution, so not so inviting to go swimming. They do an interesting thing with the waterfront here as well evidently. The government fences it off and charges people to go into the fenced area, where restaurants, bars, sports places, picnic spots, playgrounds etc... are set up and kept clean (yay!). We're not here in high season though, so it was pretty dead today. Be interesting to see how it is when it is high season - felt a little like Brighton in the middle of winter (well, apart from the fact that it was 35 degrees in the shade of course).
Anyway, tomorrow we're heading up to a nearby crater lake - Laguna de Apoyo - for the night. And we're going diving. Yup, diving in a volcano - cool! :) Ok, so it's long extinct, but it's still a volcano :)
More on that later...
