Amapala

The island of El Tigre takes its name, according to one local account, from the pirates said to have used it in the sixteenth century, whose ferocity earned the island the name "Cerro del Tigre". The town of Amapala was founded in 1838, and thanks to a natural deep-water channel it became, despite its lack of modern infrastructure, the main Honduran port on the Pacific. The port was opened and declared free in 1868, and through the nineteenth century it exported large quantities of gold, silver and other ores, although its growth was held back by the long delay in building a railway across the country to Puerto Cortés.

German immigrants played a large part in its trade in the late nineteenth century, and the town grew wealthy. Politics passed through it too: in 1876 Marco Aurelio Soto took provisional charge of the government at Amapala, and in 1895 it was named capital of the short-lived Greater Republic of Central America, an attempt to reunite El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua that broke apart in 1898.

The port's importance faded as San Lorenzo, on the mainland, took its trade, and by the mid-1970s it had been replaced. During a civil war in Nicaragua, Honduras allowed Nicaraguan rebels to set up a base on the island's summit, and its ruins remain. In 1992 a chamber of the International Court of Justice ruled on the long dispute over the gulf, deciding that the three countries share its waters and awarding El Tigre to Honduras.

Amapala is a small fishing town whose identity comes from the sea and from its past as a port. The old buildings around the square and the dock are reminders of its prosperous decades, when the town was briefly a seat of government. Today the island is a quiet place of fishing boats, tuk-tuks and beach villages named after the shores beside them.

The gulf is a shared space: Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua all have coastlines on it, and the views from the island take in the neighbouring islands. Visitors from abroad are few, and the island's character is that of a weekend retreat for families from Tegucigalpa and the south, who fill the beaches and seafood restaurants on holidays and leave the island almost empty during the week.

Life follows the rhythm of the tide, the heat and the church. A Honduran Navy base south of the town adds a small official presence to a place otherwise run at the pace of a village.

The municipality of Amapala, which covers El Tigre, the island of Zacate Grande and a scatter of islets, had 12,250 people at the 2013 census. The town of Amapala is the island's main settlement, and several villages lie around the coast and on Zacate Grande.

Most residents work as fishermen, and only a few hundred had formal jobs in 2013. Unemployment is high and much of the population is poor, especially in the villages on the eastern side of El Tigre, although a government programme has given many poor families small new houses. Tourism, mostly from Honduras itself, brings some income at weekends and during holidays.

Everyday life depends on the boats to Coyolito for supplies, school and work on the mainland, and on tuk-tuks for getting around the island. Days start early, before the heat, and evenings are spent outside in the square or in the waterfront park, where the kiosk and the grass are shared by residents and the occasional camper.

Amapala eats from the Gulf of Fonseca. Fish and shellfish, caught locally or farmed around the gulf, are the basis of most meals, often served fried whole or with lime and chilli, alongside rice, beans, fried plantain and tortillas. Shrimp farmed around the gulf are one of the south's main products.

Simple stalls a couple of blocks up from the docks sell street food, and beach villages such as Playa Burro have small places serving snacks, fried fish and fruit drinks such as fresco de sandía, a fresh watermelon drink. The baleada, a flour tortilla folded over refried beans, cream and hard cheese, is the everyday snack here as across Honduras.

The heat is fought with fresh fruit drinks, horchata and tamarind water, and with sweet melons from the Choluteca plain on the mainland, one of the region's main exports. A meal of fried fish eaten with a view of the volcanoes across the gulf is the island's simple pleasure.