While the sun sets serenely over the Maribios volcanic range, the crater of Telica just a five-minute walk behind us, gurgles and belches toxic clouds of gas into the atmosphere.
San Cristobal, Nicaragua’s highest volcano and one of its most active, has a benign, ember-like hue under the setting sun. The silhouettes of Chonco and Casita serve as outriders alongside San Cristobal’s perfect, cone-shaped, horizon-dominating profile.
My guide, Marco, looks pensive. While my gaze is fixed dreamily on the setting sun, Marco is constantly looking over his shoulder at Telica’s crater behind us. He can no longer contain his anxiety and as if at confessional, he explains that a few months ago, he had to make a swift exit from this very spot as a huge plume of ash exploded from Telica’s crater.
“Explosions are okay but it’s the eruptions we need to worry about,” he says, not altogether reassuringly.
While I ponder what distinguishes an ‘explosion’ from an ‘eruption’, Rene tells me how Spanish priests sought to exorcise these ‘mouths of hell’ by erecting crosses on their slopes and replacing the volcanos’ indigenous names with Christian titles such as San Cristobal (‘the carrier of Christ’).
While mostly latent, Nicaragua’s history is punctuated by violent reminders of the cataclysmic power of volcanoes. In 1835, the eruption of Cosiguina in the Gulf of Fonsecca could be heard 1,000 miles away in Caracas and created an ash cloud so dense it engulfed the nearby towns into darkness for almost four days. Cerro Negro, a magnet today for volcano-boarding thrill seekers, emerged from a farmer’s field in 1850 before exploding just over 100 years later, raining pyroclastic debris on the houses of Leon where the local people were forced to frantically sweep the ash from their rooves to stop them from collapsing.
The ‘most explosive region in the world’ is how Alfred Rittman referred to Nicaragua. Rittman is the father of modern volcanology, but so easily could have been writing about Nicaragua’s politics. Volatile, unstable and prone to violent eruptions, the politics of Nicaragua has always had revolution at its centre.
I meet Alberto in a bar in Leon. I buy him a Flor de Cana rum, and he gestures at the iconic label on the bottle of the Momotombo volcano that rises above Managua.
“Managua has been destroyed three times; twice by earthquake and once by revolution,” he smiles.
Volcanoes and revolution are inextricably weaved into the national psyche of Nicaragua as the murals that proliferate the walls of Leon testify.
“Leon is the brain and heart of Nicaragua” Alberto tells me. Tales of revolution, martyrdom, love and loss adorn the city walls. Brain, heart and a fierce independent spirit are in abundance but so too is a sense of sadness, almost embarrassment, at what the revolution has become. When I ask him about Nicaragua’s president, Daniel Ortega and his much-maligned wife, knowns as Murillo (‘the witch’), he says:
“It is best to say nothing – live a quiet life.”
In his book The Jaguar’s Smile, Salman Rushdie talks about how revolutions can so often become corrupted, and how with Nicaragua, what the Sandinistas set out so vehemently to vanquish they ultimately became. Alberto will not be drawn on this subject, but he tells me his older brothers were forcibly recruited to fight for the FSLN.
“We never saw them again; they never came back.”
I am in no rush to get up the next day. It was a late night with Alberto and I have learned the hard way, why the image of a volcano adorns the front of the Flor de Cana bottle; my head feels like a small eruption has gone off inside it. I drag myself out of bed as it is Good Friday and I have heard how the people of Leon decorate their streets at the end of Semana Santa with carpets of brightly coloured sawdust depicting the Passion of Christ. My guide, Marco, picks me up and we head to the region of Sutiaba on the outskirts of Leon, a community with a reputation for making the most elaborate and impressive carpets. When we arrive, we are met by the cordial hum of people coming together to celebrate a long-held and auspicious tradition. Chickens are sizzling on large drum-barrel barbecues while families sit together to watch the artisans at work on the road, applying years of practise, dedication and tradition. The sawdust is coloured using natural dyes before being dampened with water to make it more workable. It is then carefully positioned using cardboard templates to create a stain-glass window effect, before natural adornments such as rice, salt, coal and volcanic ash are added to give enhanced texture. I watch two young women working together, meticulously arranging salt crystals to create a crown of thorns on top of Jesus’s head, while another man uses pieces of coal to manufacture the mournful eyes of the Virgin Mary.
The first carpets were created by the indigenous communities of Leon in the 19th century as flamboyant and public expressions of faith. They had made a deal with the Spanish to adopt Catholicism in return for their protection and so the carpets were meant as an annual reminder that they were keeping their side of the agreement. Fast forward a couple of hundred years and relations between the church and government are inauspicious. At the height of the protests against the government in 2018, the Catholic church was accused of harbouring protestors and so in retaliation, Ortega banned the street processions which have long been the mainstay of the Catholic church’s Easter celebrations. While the carpets had not been officially prohibited, they have not been sanctioned by the government this year either. So, what started roughly two hundred years ago as an act of appeasement is today, an act of defiance.
“I have been helping to make carpets for seventy years,” says Augusto, his hands bright red from mixing sawdust with dye in preparation for a Last Supper mural. “I will continue to make carpets until God decides I cannot do it anymore.”
Later that evening, I sit outside Leon’s Grand Cathedral, listening to the sombre sound of the processions taking place inside. If it were not for Ortega’s ban, the procession known as the ‘Service of Darkness’, would carry the body of Christ all around the streets of Leon, ending up at Sutiaba, to walk across the exquisite artwork, kicking colourful sawdust into the air. The cathedral is made of whitewashed stone but along the front, I notice there are figurines made from dark stone, perched in alcoves.
“These were made to look like they had dark skin, to appeal to the indigenous Catholic converts. They were made using volcanic rock” Marco tells me.
“There really is no escaping volcanoes in Nicaragua, is there?”
Marco laughs: “Volcanoes are our past, our present and our future”.
