Esquipulas, Guatemala Summary

Southeast from Chiquimula a beautiful road heads through the hills, running beneath craggy outcrops and forested peaks before emerging suddenly at the lip of a huge, bowl-shaped valley, with the town of ESQUIPULAS below. The final town on the eastern highway, Esquipulas is the most important Catholic shrine in Central America, and is entirely dominated by the four perfectly white domes of its church, which are brilliantly floodlit at night. The rest of the town is a messy sprawl of cheap hotels, souvenir stalls and restaurants which have sprung up to serve the pilgrims who flock to the town year-round from all over Central America, creating a booming resort where people come to worship, eat, drink and relax, in a bizarre combination of holy devotion and indulgence. The principal day of pilgrimage is January 15, when even the smallest villages save enough money to send a representative or two, filling the town to bursting point. Esquipulas’s other claim to fame is as the place where the first peace accord initiatives to end the civil wars in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala were signed in 1987.