Puerto Lempira

The town's original name was Auhya Yari, Miskito for "long beach" or "long sand". It was renamed Puerto Lempira after Lempira, the Lenca leader who led an unsuccessful resistance to the Spanish conquistadors in the 1530s, with "Puerto" added for its position on the shore of the Caratasca Lagoon. The coast around it belonged to the Mosquito Coast, named after the Miskito nation and long dominated by British interests as the Miskito Kingdom; only in 1960 did the International Court of Justice award the northern part of the Mosquito Coast to Honduras.

Puerto Lempira became a municipality on 5 August 1957 and replaced Brus Laguna as capital of the department of Gracias a Dios in 1975. In the 1980s the town became a centre for CIA operations against the Sandinistas.

In October 1998 Hurricane Mitch made landfall at the Caratasca Lagoon, causing great ecological damage and substantial damage to the town and its airport. It remains the largest town in the department, though it still has no paved roads and no paved highway connecting it to the rest of Honduras.

Puerto Lempira is a Miskito town and a centre of Indigenous Miskito culture. The Miskito are a Native people of the Mosquito Coast, with their own language, and Miskito culture is dominant here, though not exclusive. Miskito is the main and official language of the region, followed by Mayangna and Spanish. Around the town, La Mosquitia is also home to the Pech and Tawahka, small peoples of the river forests, and to Garífuna villages on the coast.

The Miskito have their own Moravian churches, and the town also has a Catholic church. The town holds a Christmas patronal fair from November to late January.

Life is tied to the water and to work that is often dangerous. Many Miskito men work as lobster divers, often at great risk, and the lagoon and the sea shape the town's food, its transport and its economy. Puerto Lempira has been a sister city of Plattsburgh, New York, since 2011.

The town had about 22,860 people in a 2023 calculation. At the 2013 census the municipality, the largest in area in Honduras, had 47,528 people, about 82 per cent of them Indigenous, nearly all Miskito; it takes in more than 30 villages and over 200 hamlets.

As the capital of Gracias a Dios, the town lives largely from government and non-government jobs, the public hospital, schools and two university branches, one teaching by distance and one at the nearby community of Mistruck. Small businesses — shops, supermarkets, pharmacies, restaurants and workshops — serve the town and the villages around the lagoon, which also provides the town's main economy. There is no industry, and almost everything is brought in from the interior, so prices are two or three times those elsewhere in Honduras.

Basic services are a daily struggle. There is no sewerage, homes flood in the rainy season, and piped drinking water, available some twenty years ago, has gone, so families dig wells or buy water. Most residents have only a technical or secondary qualification, because travel to the interior for study is beyond their means, and mobile internet is limited to patchy 4G.

Puerto Lempira is known for its seafood and plantain. The Caratasca Lagoon provides the town's main economy, and lobster diving is the main source of income across the department. Along the Mosquito Coast, seafood, including shrimp and lobster, has been the region's boom market since the 1970s, and the green sea turtle was long a staple of the Miskito diet.

The municipal market is the place to see what the town eats, with fresh seafood sold alongside other produce. In the coastal areas of Honduras, seafood and some meats are prepared in many ways, including with coconut milk, and rice and beans is a popular side dish on the Caribbean coast.

Because the town has no industry and almost all food has to be brought in from the interior of Honduras, prices in its shops are double or triple those elsewhere in the country. Horchata and agua de nance are common drinks with meals across Honduras.