Santa Ana

The city was founded by the Poqomam Maya during the Classic period. When the Pipil conquered the area around 1200, they gave it the Nahuat name Sihuatehuacán, "place of priestesses"; the old settlement lay in what is now the suburb of Santa Bárbara, west of the Apanchacal and Apanteos rivers. Earlier settlements in the area had been emptied by the great eruption of the Ilopango volcano. After the Spanish conquest, on 26 July 1569, the Guatemalan bishop Bernardino Villalpando renamed the town Santa Ana, and he founded its first parish, a hermitage on the site of today's cathedral.

Santa Ana got its own town council in 1806 and the title of city in 1824. In 1894 a revolution launched from the city overthrew President Carlos Ezeta, who had ruled as a de facto dictator. The decades around 1900 were the city's golden age: in the boom years of coffee it was the most prosperous city in the country, home to businessmen who owned the processing plants that prepared coffee for export, and that wealth paid for the neo-Gothic cathedral, begun in 1906, and the theatre, completed in 1910.

The later 20th century was harder. After the civil war, Santa Ana, like the rest of the country, faced rising crime driven by the gangs. The earthquake of January 2001 damaged the city's churches, among them El Calvario, which was later rebuilt, and in October 2005 the Santa Ana volcano erupted, killing at least two people and forcing villagers from their homes.

Santa Ana takes pride in being the country's second city and in the architecture its coffee fortune left behind. The cathedral is unusual in a region of Spanish colonial churches: a neo-Gothic building, consecrated in 1913 and completed in 1959 with the marble altar of Saint Anne, the city's patron. The theatre across the square is the main venue for the performing arts, alongside the Cine Principal and a municipal multi-purpose centre.

The city is the seat of the Diocese of Santa Ana, and Catholic life runs through its year, from the churches of El Calvario and El Carmen to the Fiestas Julias in the second half of July, the city's biggest traditional celebration. Football means Club Deportivo FAS, one of the best-known clubs in the country, which plays at the Estadio Óscar Quiteño.

The landscape is part of the city's identity. The Santa Ana volcano, called Ilamatepec, rises to the south, and the neighbouring Izalco cone was known to sailors as the "lighthouse of the Pacific" for its constant eruptions. The Santa Ana volcano is also said to have inspired one of the volcanoes in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, through his Salvadoran wife Consuelo.

The municipality had about 251,000 inhabitants in 2024. It is the capital of Santa Ana department and is divided into 35 colonias, or neighbourhoods, and 318 small villages. Coffee still matters to the area, and a major coffee-processing centre lies near the city.

Daily commerce centres on the two main markets, the Mercado Colón and the Mercado Central, a few streets apart, and on Metrocentro, the city's largest shopping mall. Local buses run from early morning until evening, and many smaller shops close for lunch between noon and two, after six in the evening and on Sundays, when Metrocentro and the supermarkets stay open. Visitors come above all for the cathedral and the theatre, and for the volcano and the lake nearby.

The climate is warm all year, and maximum temperatures at times pass 35 °C. The municipality also has two water parks, Apanteos and Sihuatehuacán, and the lake at Coatepeque is one of the main attractions of the whole department.

Santa Ana eats the national staples. The pupusa — a thick corn or rice tortilla stuffed with cheese, beans, chicharrón or loroco flower buds, griddled and served with curtido, a tangy cabbage slaw, and tomato salsa — is sold in pupuserías across the city. Comedores, simple eateries with set meals, serve beans, rice, eggs, fried plantain, crema and queso fresco, and tamales.

Yuca frita with chicharrón, panes rellenos — warm stuffed sandwiches, often of chicken — and sopa de pata, a soup of cow tripe and plantain, fill out the menu. The markets are the place to see what the region grows: the Mercado Colón and the Mercado Central, a few streets apart, offer a great variety of produce. Coffee is the city's historic crop, grown on the fincas of the surrounding hills, and horchata made with rice milk, morro seeds, sesame and spices, chan and tamarind drinks are everyday refreshments. The national liquor is Tic Tack, a sugar-cane spirit.