Gracias

Gracias was founded in October 1536 as Gracias a Dios by Gonzalo de Alvarado y Chávez, a cousin of the conquistador Pedro de Alvarado, at a place called Opoa near the Higuito river. The name, it is said, came from the relief of Spanish explorers who had crossed the mountains: "Thank God we have arrived at flat land." It was made a municipality in 1539, and on 16 May 1544 it became the seat of the Audiencia de los Confines, the royal court that applied Spanish law across Central America, ruling on land claims, encomiendas and taxes.

The court moved to Santiago de Guatemala, today Antigua, in 1549, and Gracias was eclipsed by Antigua and Comayagua. The church of La Merced was built in 1611 and San Marcos in the eighteenth century. In 1863 General José María Medina took office as president of Honduras in Gracias while staying at his nearby ranch, and the present San Cristóbal fortress, begun that year, was completed in the mid-1870s on a hill where a Spanish work had stood since the seventeenth century.

Rebel forces took the town in the civil war of 1924, and in 1959 rebel army officers made the fort their stronghold in a short-lived uprising in which two soldiers died. A public drinking-water supply arrived only in 1949. In recent years historic buildings such as La Merced have been restored, and Gracias has become one of the places Hondurans themselves most like to visit.

Gracias is the capital of Lempira, the department named after the Lenca leader who resisted the Spanish, and Lenca culture is part of daily life in the town and the hills around it. In the 2013 census about a quarter of the municipality's people identified as Lenca. In nearby villages such as La Campa, women make Lenca pottery by hand, and the name Celaque itself is said to mean "box of water" in the now-extinct Lenca language.

The town keeps a strong sense of its colonial importance, visible in its three churches — La Merced, San Marcos and San Sebastián — and in the Casa Galeano, a family house turned history museum. Religious life follows the Catholic calendar: Holy Week is widely celebrated, and Gracias holds two patron-saint fairs, on 25 April for St Mark and on 13 December for St Lucy.

Many visitors come from within Honduras, drawn by the colonial streets, the hot springs and the mountain, and the town's quiet, small-town pace is much of its appeal. People are courteous and reserved, in the manner of the west.

The town of Gracias has about 18,500 people and the wider municipality about 61,000, by 2023 calculations, most of them living in rural villages. Most people work in farming, cattle and forestry, and crops change with height: maize and beans in the lower valleys, fruit and vegetables higher up the mountain. Many households still cook with firewood, and few own a car.

As the department capital, Gracias is the regional centre for government, banking, schooling and health care, with a hospital, university centres, local radio and television stations, markets and craft shops. It is also a transport hub for the surrounding area, linked by paved road to Santa Rosa de Copán and by bus to La Esperanza and San Pedro Sula.

Tourism, built on the colonial churches, Celaque and the hot springs, is seen locally as a way to develop the economy, and it has paid for much of the recent improvement to the town's buildings and services. Celaque's rivers supply the town's water.

Gracias eats the food of the western highlands, and maize is at the heart of it. Tortillas are made fresh each day and served with eggs, refried beans, queso fresco, crema, a salty sour cream, and quesillo, a lightly salted cheese that melts easily. Tamales and tamalitos de elote, small tamales of sweet yellow corn dough, are common, and the dairy of the area goes into many dishes.

Chicha, a fermented maize drink, is drunk in Lenca ceremonies during the crop seasons, and atol is a warm corn drink. Rosquillas, rings of maize dough made with cheese, and semitas, a kind of bread, are eaten with coffee, which is grown on the slopes of Celaque around the town. In the west, Lenca families still eat traditional foods such as tamales pisques and atol shuko, a purple paste of black maize.

Restaurants and small eateries are found in the compact centre, and the market two blocks west of the square sells produce from the farms of the valley and the mountain.