Jinotega

The name Jinotega comes from the Náhuatl Xiotenko, "the place next to the jiñocuajo trees", although its origin is debated, and most of the place names around it remain in the Matagalpa language. A Spanish census of 1581 listed it as an entirely Indigenous town with no Spanish presence. In the early 1600s the Mercedarian friar Juan de Albuquerque gave it the name San Juan de Jinotega, with John the Baptist as its patron, but its people clung to their old name.

Spanish settlers began to live near the town from 1690. In 1703 the missionary Margil de Jesús, who found still no permanent Spanish presence, had a large cross placed on the highest point of Cerro Chirinagua, on the western edge of the town; the hill is now called the Cerro de la Cruz. At the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th, coffee transformed the economy, drawing entrepreneurs from Granada and León as well as German and British immigrants, and the community of La Fundadora, owned by a British man named Potter, became one of the first and largest coffee producers in the north.

Sandino's guerrillas fought the American occupation troops in these mountains. In the late 1970s Jinotega was a key battleground between the troops of Anastasio Somoza Debayle and the rebel population, and from 19 May 1979 the Sandinistas' Northern Front launched its final offensive here. From 1981 the mountains of the department became a battleground of the Contra war.

Jinotega is known as the "City of Mists" for the clouds that drift continually over the top of its valley, and also as "the Eternal City of Men". It calls itself the coffee capital of Nicaragua, and its coffee has won national and international prizes for quality. Coffee sets the calendar: during the December to February harvest, trucks move in and out of the north side of town and men carry coffee on their backs.

The town's great popular festival is the Fiesta de la Cruz in May, held for three centuries, when pilgrims climb the Peña de la Cruz to fulfil promises to the Holy Cross and drink agualoja, the local corn wine. The cathedral, dedicated to St John, is the centre of religious life.

Northern music and crafts survive: the polka and mazurka, brought by immigrants, are played at dances in the Segovias and Jinotega, and artisans make black pottery. Colonial Spanish surnames such as Castro, Duarte and Sobalvarro are still the most common in many villages, and the Indigenous names of the villages around the valley have outlasted the Spanish ones.

In 2012 about 124,000 people lived in the municipality of Jinotega, of whom about 38 per cent lived in the urban area; the rest live in villages scattered over the hills. The town is the capital of the department of Jinotega, which runs north to the Honduran border and the Bosawás reserve.

Coffee is everything here. The department grows a large share of the country's crop, and about 90 per cent of the coffee is in the hands of small and medium producers. Most of it is exported, to the United States, Russia, Canada and Europe. Lake Apanás, the artificial lake north of the town, feeds one of the country's main hydroelectric plants. Cattle are raised too, and their owners sell them directly to slaughterhouses in Managua, Chontales and Condega.

Life starts early, with coffee at dawn and much of the work done before the afternoon rain. Seasonal work on Costa Rican and Honduran coffee farms and emigration further afield bring remittances into many households.

Highland cooking is built on maize, beans and dairy. Güirilas, thick, slightly sweet griddle cakes of fresh young maize, are eaten with cuajada, a fresh curd cheese, or cream, and local pupusas, stuffed maize cakes, are sold in the town. Gallo pinto, rice and beans fried together, and tortillas come with every meal.

Nacatamales, large banana-leaf parcels of maize dough with pork, rice and potato, and sopa de gallina, hen soup, are the weekend and fiesta dishes, and rosquillas, crunchy rings of maize dough and cheese, go with afternoon coffee.

The local drink is agualoja, a kind of corn wine drunk above all at the Fiesta de la Cruz, and chicha, another fermented maize drink, is common across the highlands. Coffee is drunk strong and sweet at home, while several farms near Jinotega run tastings of the speciality coffees grown for export. In the hills around the town, coffee tours combine walks through the cloud forest with a look at how the beans are grown, picked and dried, the crop locals call green gold.