The Smallest Country and the Longest Wave
A world-class right-hand point break thirty minutes from an international airport, unknown for forty years because of a war. El Salvador’s recent history has been extreme in every direction — twelve years of civil war, two decades of the highest homicide rates on earth, and a state of exception that changed daily life and is still running.
At Punta Roca, just outside La Libertad, the swell wraps around a rock headland and unwinds along a cobblestone point in a right-hander that surfers who have ridden everywhere describe in the same terms they use for the great waves of Indonesia. It breaks best from March to October, holds size, and is thirty minutes from an international airport. For four decades almost nobody outside a small circle knew it was there, because of a war.
El Salvador is the smallest country on the American mainland and the most densely populated in Central America, with the most volcanoes per square kilometre and a Pacific coast that produces long, mechanical point breaks with a consistency that geography rarely delivers. Its recent history has been extreme in every direction, and the surf is one of the few threads that runs through all of it.
Twelve years
The civil war ran from 1980 to 1992 between the military government and the FMLN guerrilla coalition, in a country the size of Wales. Around seventy-five thousand people were killed. The UN Truth Commission that reported in 1993 attributed the large majority of documented violations to state forces and allied death squads.
The war has a set of images that fixed it internationally: the assassination of Archbishop Óscar Romero at the altar in March 1980, the day after a homily calling on soldiers to disobey orders to kill; the murder of four American churchwomen that December; the El Mozote massacre in December 1981, in which a US-trained army battalion killed close to a thousand villagers, and which the Salvadoran and US governments denied for over a decade until forensic exhumation confirmed it; and the murder of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter at the Central American University in 1989.
Romero was canonised in 2018. The chapel where he was shot is a place of pilgrimage, and the small house beside it where he lived is kept as it was, including the bloodied vestments.
The 1992 Chapultepec Accords ended the war, dissolved the security bodies responsible for much of the violence, and turned the FMLN into a political party that later won the presidency twice. An amnesty law protected perpetrators on both sides until the constitutional court struck it down in 2016, since when a small number of prosecutions have proceeded slowly.
What came after the war
Peace did not produce safety. Hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans had fled to the United States during the war, many to Los Angeles, where young men formed and joined street gangs — MS-13 and Barrio 18 among them. Mass deportations through the 1990s returned members to a country with a shattered institutional structure and no capacity to absorb them.
The result was two decades in which El Salvador recorded among the highest homicide rates in the world, peaking in the mid-2010s. Extortion of small businesses was near-universal in affected neighbourhoods; internal displacement ran into tens of thousands a year.
In March 2022, following a weekend of extreme violence, the government declared a state of exception suspending certain constitutional guarantees, and began mass arrests. Tens of thousands of people have been detained. The government reports that homicide rates have fallen to among the lowest in the hemisphere, and Salvadorans across the political spectrum report a transformation in daily safety that is not in dispute.
What is disputed is the cost. Human rights organisations have documented arbitrary detention, deaths in custody, and the imprisonment of people with no gang affiliation; the state of exception has been renewed continuously since it began. Salvadorans will tell you both things — that they can now take a bus at night for the first time in their lives, and that they know someone detained without charge — and the tension between those two sentences is the central fact of the country right now.
Ask about safety and you get the same answer twice: it changed completely, and here is what it cost. Both halves are said by the same person.
The other experiment
In 2021 El Salvador became the first country in the world to adopt bitcoin as legal tender alongside the US dollar, which it had adopted in 2001 after abandoning its own currency.
The stated rationale was remittances: Salvadorans abroad send home sums equivalent to a very large share of national GDP, and the transfer fees charged by conventional operators represent a substantial annual leakage. A state wallet was launched with an incentive to sign up.
Adoption in practice has been limited — most surveys have found that a minority of the population uses it for transactions and that dollar cash remains overwhelmingly dominant — and the IMF pressed for the legal-tender status to be narrowed as a condition of financing, which was subsequently done. The country continues to hold bitcoin on its balance sheet and to promote itself internationally on the strength of it.
For a visitor the practical situation is that the dollar is the currency, cards work in cities and coastal tourist areas, and cash is necessary anywhere else. El Zonte — the beach village rebranded Bitcoin Beach where the experiment began — genuinely does accept it in some places, which makes it a curiosity worth a look rather than a payment strategy.
The people who left, and what they send back
Something in the order of a fifth to a quarter of all Salvadorans live outside the country, overwhelmingly in the United States, and the money they send home is one of the largest remittance flows relative to GDP anywhere in the world — routinely above a fifth of national output and, in recent years, higher still.
That single fact explains a great deal about how the country works. It funds household consumption rather than investment, which supports the retail economy and does little for productive capacity. It props up the dollar economy, which is one reason dollarisation has survived. And it makes US immigration policy a domestic Salvadoran issue in a way that has no real parallel: the status of Temporary Protected Status, held by hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans since the earthquakes of 2001, has been litigated and re-litigated for years, and every ruling moves money in San Miguel and Chalatenango.
You see it physically in the remittance towns of the east — houses with second storeys added year by year as the money arrives, satellite dishes, pickup trucks, and a demographic hollow where the working-age men should be. The phrase used is hermanos lejanos, distant brothers, and it is on a monument at the entrance to San Salvador.
It is also why the diaspora’s culture flows both ways. Salvadoran food, music and slang have circulated back from Los Angeles and Washington DC, and a returning generation with American schooling has shaped everything from the surf economy on the coast to the country’s technology policy.
A country you can cross in three hours
The compactness is the appeal. You can surf in the morning, be at a volcano crater by mid-afternoon, and eat pupusas in a colonial town by dark.
The Ruta de las Flores runs through the western highlands between Sonsonate and Ahuachapán, linking coffee towns — Juayúa, Apaneca, Ataco, Nahuizalco — with weekend food fairs, painted murals and cool air at 1,200 metres. Santa Ana volcano, the highest in the country, has a crater lake of an unreal turquoise and a two-hour climb to see it; below it sits Lago de Coatepeque, a caldera lake, and the Cerro Verde park.
Joya de Cerén is the archaeological site that matters most and gets the least attention: a Maya farming village buried under volcanic ash around 600 CE and preserved with its household objects, gardens and buildings intact — the Pompeii comparison is used constantly and for once is accurate. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site and it tells you what ordinary Maya life looked like, which the great ceremonial cities do not.
And the coast: La Libertad and Punta Roca; El Tunco and El Zonte for the beginner-friendly end; El Cuco and Las Flores further east for long, empty right-handers. The Salvadoran surf season runs roughly March to October on the southern swell, and the water is warm enough that a wetsuit is an eccentricity.
Pupusas — thick maize cakes stuffed with cheese, beans or chicharrón, griddled and served with curtido and salsa — are eaten everywhere, cost almost nothing, and are the subject of a national day. Start there and work outwards.
Hiroshi covers rural Japan — the peninsulas, the fishing towns, the villages the shinkansen skips. His slow reporting on the Noto earthquake recovery has run in three languages.