Grenada

For me Grenada was just as a city should be. Busy but not hectic, clean but not sterile, old but not decrepit. It is a colonial city, built in a Spanish style with stucco and red tiled roofs. From the street, blocks of buildings look unbroken by greenery, every wall pushed tight up against the next. What makes them so lovely though is that they are all built around a large central courtyard that is open to the sky and fresh air. As you walk down a street you can often see in through the iron clad "screen" doors to a mini oasis inside.


The day Chris and I spent wandering the city was lovely. It had rained hard the night before but the morning was sunny and clear. We set out for breakfast and found a woman selling bags of cut up fresh fruit- pineapple, papaya, watermelon and banana, for 20 cordobas, or about 50 cents each. We wandered by lovely churches, sat in a shady park, came across an old military garrison which was closed to visitors but when the guard noticed us peering in unlocked the chain for us and told us to go up one of the towers for a view over the city. The grounds were beautiful and tranquil, and it was hard to imagine the torture and executions that took place there during the Somoza regime.


From another bell tower we saw the skyline stretch to Lake Nicaragua and volcanoes in the distance. We took a wander through a very local market- the kind where everyone is so pushed together you literally scrape past people to move, where there are vendor stalls inside the building (in this case it looked like an ancient church) but the market has grown out and around from it's center in a mass covered in tarps and plastic sheeting, where flies swarm and are lazily flicked away with a palm frond from raw chickens and blocks of cheese that are rarely even covered by plastic.


We didn't go that local but we had lunch in one of the many kioscos set up in the central park under the shade of palm trees and the view of the cathedral. The staple food of the country is "gallo pinto", a mix of rice and beans, and here we got some chicken, a piece of white cheese and a corn tortilla. Very simple food but my general impression is that Nicas can really cook because almost every plate I had was really tasty.


That evening I went with a group from Leo Tours to the Volcano Masaya. Six of us went with our driver/guide who took us to lava fields, 5 different craters, and a couple of short hikes where we got spectacular dusky views. Once the sun started going down we went into one of the bat caves in the area which is exactly that, full of bats. They are cute little tiny insect eating bats, and we were there just as they were waking and heading out for the night. At the entrance to a couple of the caves it was practically a swarm of bats rushing past your head! We took a final peek into the crater of the active volcano in hopes of seeing lava, but there was too much steam and gasses coming up to see anything. Once back in town I had a really nice evening with one of the girls from the group, sitting in the sidewalk cafes on the busy pedestrian street in the city center, sharing pizzas and beers.

Grenada seems a very livable city. It is actually full of expats now, and some locals "joke" it is the second American invasion of the city, after William Walker in the 1850's was hired to invade Grenada by the warring other major city of Leon, but then somehow had himself elected president of Nicaragua. These days it is foreign money buying most of the property in Grenada which brings lovely cafes, bookstores, and hotels, but also drives prices up and out of the range of locals. It is certainly a bit of a catch 22, but at the moment it has made for a lovely combination and a charming city.