El Castillo

The rapids of the Río San Juan were an obstacle from the first Spanish attempts to navigate the river in the 16th century, and they made this site the key to the route from the Caribbean to Lake Nicaragua and Granada. After pirate raids on Granada, Spanish authorities chose the Raudal de Santa Cruz, now the Raudal del Diablo, on the ruins of an earlier fort, and on 10 March 1673 began the Fortaleza de la Limpia Pura e Inmaculada Concepción. It was completed in 1675, and the village grew around it. Even so, the buccaneer William Dampier plundered and burned the settlement in 1685.

In the 18th century the fortress faced repeated attacks by Miskito and British forces. On 26 July 1762 a British and Miskito expedition from Jamaica laid siege to it, eleven days after the garrison commander had died. His 19-year-old daughter, Rafaela Herrera, became the hero of the six-day defence, which ended with the attackers withdrawing on 3 August; King Charles III later granted her a life pension. In 1780, during the San Juan Expedition, a British force including the 22-year-old Captain Horatio Nelson took the fortress by attacking from the hill behind it, still called Lomas de Nelson. Disease ravaged the British, who abandoned the fort in January 1781.

The fortress kept its strategic value until the late 18th century. In the 20th century the area produced bananas for export through Costa Rica, until disease ended the trade, and in 1995 the fortress was placed on Nicaragua's tentative list for World Heritage status.

The village's identity is bound up with its fortress. Rafaela Herrera is honoured as the local heroine, and the story of the defence of 1762 is part of the village's pride; the fortress itself now houses a museum and a library, where visitors can read with the sound of the river below. At the fortress the long contest between Spain and Britain over the river route can still be seen on the ground.

Life here is shaped by the river rather than by the Caribbean culture of the coast: El Castillo is a Spanish-speaking village in the department of Río San Juan, and the river is its street, its place of work and its link to the world, travelled by the boats that come and go from San Carlos.

The rainforest is the other half of local identity. The Indio Maíz Biological Reserve begins just downriver, and guiding visitors into it has become one of the village's livelihoods, alongside sport fishing for tarpon on this stretch of the river.

The village is part of the municipality of El Castillo, a large, remote area of rainforest, farms and river communities whose seat is Boca de Sábalos, upriver. The municipality has about 43,000 people, only around a fifth of whom live in urban areas; the village of El Castillo is a small part of that.

The area has long lived from the forest — logging of tropical hardwoods and the gathering of medicinal plants and other forest products — and from farming. Bananas were a major export from 1948 to 1951 and again from 1968 to 1970, shipped to Puerto Limón in Costa Rica, until the black sigatoka disease ended the trade. Today maize, beans, cacao, oranges and oil palm are grown, and ecotourism and sport fishing are growing.

Distance is the great problem. There are few roads, so getting to school, to a clinic or to market often means a boat, and many children of school age do not attend because of the distances involved. In the village itself life is quiet and car-free.

Freshwater prawns, camarones de río, are what El Castillo is known for: cheap and popular, though fishing for them is closed for part of the year to protect the stock, usually from February to April. The municipality has only a handful of restaurants, and the river's catch goes straight to their tables. Fish from the San Juan, including the tarpon that gives Boca de Sábalos its name, are caught on this stretch of the river.

Beyond the river's produce, the cooking is that of rural Nicaragua: gallo pinto, rice and beans fried together, at almost every meal, with fried plantain, eggs, cheese and tortillas, and the Sunday nacatamal, a banana-leaf parcel of maize dough and pork. Bakeries and small shops across the municipality supply bread and basics.

Fresh fruit drinks are the thing to order; one of the village's cafés is proud of juices made without added water or sugar. Nicaraguan beer and rum are the evening drinks along the river.