The Canal That Never Came
Nature had already built most of a transoceanic canal across Nicaragua, and for two centuries the country was told it was about to be transformed by one. A volcano on a postage stamp sent the Americans to Panama; the 2013 Chinese concession broke ground and then evaporated. Nothing was ever built.
Lake Nicaragua is large enough to have waves, weather and its own horizon — over eight thousand square kilometres of fresh water with two volcanoes rising out of the middle of it, joined at the waist by a lava isthmus to form the island of Ometepe. From the ferry, with Concepción’s perfect cone ahead and Maderas wrapped in cloud beside it, it is difficult to believe this is a lake at all.
It is also the reason Nicaragua spent two centuries being told it was about to become one of the most important countries on earth, and the reason it never did.
The route everybody wanted
Look at the map the way a nineteenth-century engineer would. The San Juan river runs from the eastern end of Lake Nicaragua to the Caribbean — navigable, wide, already used. The lake itself reaches to within about twenty kilometres of the Pacific across the Rivas isthmus, which is low. In other words, nature had already built most of a transoceanic canal, and the missing piece was shorter than anything Panama offered.
The idea is old. Spanish surveyors examined it in the sixteenth century. In the 1850s Cornelius Vanderbilt ran an actual working transit service across it — steamer up the San Juan, across the lake, carriage over the isthmus — carrying prospectors to the California gold rush faster and cheaper than the alternatives, without a canal being dug at all.
The United States studied the Nicaragua route seriously and, for a period, preferred it. What killed it in Washington in 1902 was, famously, a volcano and a postage stamp: the eruption of Mont Pelée on Martinique had put volcanic risk in the news, and lobbyists for the Panama route reportedly circulated a Nicaraguan stamp depicting a smoking volcano to every senator. The Senate chose Panama by a handful of votes.
The idea would not die. The Bryan–Chamorro Treaty of 1914 gave the United States exclusive rights to build a Nicaraguan canal — not to build it, but to ensure nobody else did, which was the point. In 2013 the Nicaraguan assembly granted a fifty-year concession to a Hong Kong-based company for a canal three times the length of Panama’s, cutting across the lake. Ground was ceremonially broken in late 2014. Protests by rural communities facing expropriation ran for years. The financing never materialised, the company’s principal lost most of his fortune in a Chinese market crash, and by 2024 the concession had been formally repealed. Nothing was built.
For two hundred years Nicaragua has been the country that is about to be transformed by a canal. The transformation is the one thing that has never arrived.
What the lake actually is
Ignore the canal and the lake is remarkable on its own terms. It holds bull sharks, which travel up the San Juan from the Caribbean and adapt to fresh water — for a long time they were believed to be a landlocked endemic species until tagging showed them moving between the lake and the sea. Sawfish and tarpon do the same.
Ometepe, in the middle, is a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve and one of the more purely pleasant places in Central America. Concepción, at 1,610 metres, is an active stratovolcano and a hard, hot, eight-hour climb; Maderas is lower, extinct, wrapped in cloud forest and holds a crater lake you can swim in. Between them, plantain fields, petroglyphs carved by pre-Columbian inhabitants on basalt boulders, and a road that has only relatively recently been paved all the way round.
The other volcanic landscape is on the mainland: the Cordillera de los Maribios, a line of cones running north-west from Managua, including Masaya — where you can drive to a crater rim and look directly down at an open lava lake, one of very few places on earth where that is possible — and Cerro Negro, a young cinder cone that people slide down on plywood boards for reasons that make more sense on the way up than the way down.
The line of fire
Nicaragua sits on the Central American Volcanic Arc, where the Cocos plate slides under the Caribbean plate at a rate of several centimetres a year, and the consequences are written across the western half of the country.
The Maribios chain runs north-west from Managua in a nearly straight line of cones — San Cristóbal, Telica, Cerro Negro, Momotombo — and the country counts around twenty volcanoes with historical activity. Cerro Negro is the youngest volcano in Central America, having first appeared in a farmer’s field in 1850, and has erupted repeatedly since.
The cost has been enormous. Managua was destroyed by earthquake in 1931 and again in 1972, the second time killing something in the order of ten thousand people and levelling the centre. The city was never rebuilt as a conventional downtown — the ruined cathedral still stands roofless as a monument, and Managua sprawls low and wide because building tall on that ground was judged not worth the risk. Ask for directions and you will be told to go two blocks from where the Pepsi factory used to be, because the old landmarks survived the buildings.
The compensation is agricultural. Volcanic soil is the reason the Pacific slope grows coffee, tobacco and vegetables at yields the rest of the isthmus envies, and the reason the Estelí valley in the north became one of the great cigar-producing regions of the world after Cuban growers relocated there in the 1960s. Fertility and catastrophe come from the same subduction zone, on different timescales.
Granada and León
Nicaragua’s two colonial cities have been arguing since the sixteenth century, and the argument shaped the country.
Granada, on the lake, was conservative, wealthy and mercantile. León, to the north-west, was liberal, intellectual and clerical. Their rivalry over which would be the capital was so unresolvable that in 1852 the answer was to designate Managua — a town of no particular importance halfway between them — and that remains the capital today, which is one reason Managua feels less like a city than an administrative decision.
Granada is the prettier: single-storey pastel houses with interior courtyards, a yellow cathedral, and horse carriages that are for tourists but were not always. León is the more interesting: the largest cathedral in Central America, a UNESCO site whose white roof you can walk barefoot across, murals commemorating the revolution on half the walls in town, and a university population that keeps the politics live.
The rivalry had one catastrophic episode. In 1855 León’s liberals hired an American mercenary, William Walker, to help them defeat Granada. Walker won, then made himself president of Nicaragua, reinstated slavery, declared English an official language, and was recognised by the United States before a coalition of Central American armies drove him out. He burned Granada as he retreated and left a sign in the ashes reading here was Granada. He was executed in Honduras in 1860. It is not ancient history in the way it sounds; it is why Nicaraguans read foreign intervention with a particular sharpness.
Since 2018
Any honest piece about Nicaragua has to address the present, because the country a visitor would have found in 2017 is not the one that exists now.
In April 2018 protests began over social security reforms and spread rapidly into a broad movement against the government of Daniel Ortega. The state response was violent; human rights bodies including the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights documented several hundred deaths over the following months. In the years since, the government has closed thousands of civil society organisations and NGOs, expelled or stripped citizenship from opposition figures and writers, closed independent media outlets, and imprisoned or exiled critics. Hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans have emigrated.
Tourism, which had been the fastest-growing sector, collapsed and has recovered only partially. For a visitor, the practical situation today is that most of the country is calm and ordinary travel functions — but journalism, political photography, and conversations about the government carry real risk for the Nicaraguans involved, not for the foreigner. That asymmetry is the thing to hold onto.
The people you will meet are among the warmest in Central America and the country is beautiful and cheap and largely empty of other visitors. All of that is true at the same time as the rest of it, and pretending otherwise — in either direction — is the failure mode of most travel writing about this country.
Kwame edits ExplWorld’s Africa coverage and drives the continent’s worst roads personally to keep the guides honest. Formerly of the BBC’s Lagos bureau, he has crossed the Sahel five times and maintains the magazine’s overland-border database himself.