Copán Ruinas

The modern town stands on the site of a large complex of the Classic Maya city of Copán, whose ruined core lies about 1.6 kilometres away. Copán was occupied for more than two thousand years and from the fifth to the ninth centuries AD was the capital of a powerful kingdom at the south-eastern edge of the Maya world, known for a sculptural style all its own. In 738 its king Uaxaclajuun Ub'aah K'awiil was captured and executed by the ruler of Quiriguá, and by the early tenth century the city had been abandoned.

The present town began as a village beside the ruins. By 1887 it was a hamlet in the jurisdiction of Santa Rita; the municipality of Copán Ruinas was created on 1 January 1893, and in 1942 it was given the title of city. Archaeological work brought visitors and steady attention: the British archaeologist Alfred Maudslay surveyed the site, and later excavations dug tunnels under the Acropolis that uncovered earlier temples, among them the almost intact Rosalila shrine. The site was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1980 and a national cultural monument in 1982.

In 1940 the army built the Fuerte Cabañas barracks above the town to guard the border; restored, it has housed the Casa K'inich children's museum since 2002. Tourism has since reshaped the centre with guesthouses, cafés and language schools, while most of the municipality remains farming country.

The town's identity is bound up with the ruins. Guides, carvers and shop owners live from the ancient city, and craft shops sell work in clay, jade, stone and woven cloth. Scarlet macaws, a bird that appears in the art of Copán's early kings, fly over the ruins and even through the town, and a bird park outside town cares for rescued birds.

Ch'orti' Maya communities live in the surrounding hills, and their language is one of the three used in the Casa K'inich museum, alongside Spanish and English. Villages such as La Pintada are visited on horseback rides from town. Within the town, life follows the Catholic calendar and the main square, where fruit sellers line up their pickups on Sundays.

Because so many foreigners pass through, the town has many small Spanish schools, and every December it hosts the Conference on Honduras, where grassroots organisations meet to discuss education, health and community projects across the country.

The municipality had about 39,500 people in 2015, most of them living in rural villages and hamlets rather than in the town itself. Behind the cafés of the centre, most families live from subsistence farming and from growing maize, coffee and beans, and development indicators for the municipality show high levels of poverty.

The town is the administrative centre and the place where tourism money is earned: in guesthouses, restaurants, tour agencies, mototaxis and the ruins themselves. Coffee from the surrounding hills is both a crop and a visitor attraction, with farms offering tours. Local life in the valley is slow-paced and calm, and mototaxis carry most short trips, since the town has no public transport network.

The CA-11 highway through the Copán valley is the main link between western Honduras and eastern Guatemala, and the El Florido border is about 20 minutes away, so traffic and trade cross the town's edge daily.

Most restaurants serve the plato típico, the restaurant form of the carneada, a plate of grilled meat counted among Honduras's national dishes. Tortillas come with most meals, along with cuajada, a fresh cheese, and mantequilla, a Honduran cream. Beans, refried and served with slices of fried green plantain, turn up at almost every meal, as they do across Honduras. Licuados, fruit smoothies blended with water or milk, are the everyday drink.

Coffee is the local crop, grown on the hills around town alongside maize and beans; the cafés near the square serve it, and farms outside town show how it is grown and processed. Rosquillas, a Honduran ring of corn dough made with cheese, are a breakfast treat.

Thanks to tourism, the town has the most varied restaurants in western Honduras, with Mexican and international food alongside comedores serving Honduran meals, and a small market near the centre for fruit and vegetables. On Sundays fruit sellers line the centre with their pickup trucks.