In January 2026, we went on a nine-day trip to El Salvador. Why El Salvador? For one, we often like to take trips to less touristy, less-discovered locations. Two, we have enjoyed Antigua, Guatemala many times over the years, but we have not visited there since about 2016 due in part to increased crime. El Salvador is very safe with almost no crime. Three, we would not have to hassle with currency exchange because El Salvador uses the US dollar.
Our flight from DFW Airport on a Wednesday morning at 10:45am was at about the same time as a flight our friends were taking on their trip to Cozumel. We shared a ride to the airport, and they joined us at the Centurion Lounge before our flights. That was a fun way to start the trip!
And for once, we hit the weather jackpot. The day after we left, Texas got hit with frigid winter weather that lasted for two weeks. In El Salvador, the daytime highs ranged from 86 to 92, and we saw no rain. We have been on many trips where we left unseasonably great weather to go to unseasonably bad weather at our travel destination.
We decided to do a 4 day/3-night guided tour as an effective way to get acquainted with the country. We chose EC Tours, a local company that had excellent reviews. The tour price was an excellent value—for $1,150, we had three nights at the Barceló Hotel San Salvador, and four full days of activities with both a guide and a driver. The only minor glitch was that our three hotel nights at the Barceló started the day after we arrived. The Barceló did not have any available rooms the day we arrived. We ended up staying our first night at the Hilton. The Hilton was great; we just had the hassle of unpacking and packing for a one-night stay. As a nice bonus, I was able to try a pupusa for the first time at breakfast at the Hilton. The nice lady making the pupusas explained to me in Spanish how to eat a pupusa. Thankfully, I could interpret her hand gestures!
The other smart decision we made on this trip was not renting a car. Driving there would have been incredibly stressful. We hired the same tour company to drive us to our other locations after our tour ended. The price for all that driving was only slightly more than a rental car would have been.
Day one of the tour started with a hike at the El Boquerón volcano near San Salvador. But on the way there, our driver stopped to help another EC Tour vehicle that had pulled off the road with a flat tire. After helping them get on their way, we proceeded to the volcano.
After the volcano visit, we headed back to the central part of San Salvador and began a walking city tour. We started at a beautiful park with murals about the civil war period. What made the day fascinating for me was hearing from our guide, Gerson, about what life was like in El Salvador today, and how different it was a dozen years ago. Today it is very safe. Crime is almost unheard of. When Gerson was a kid, gang members would accost him. If he went to a neighborhood other than his home, he was risking his life. Gerson also described the extremely awful civil war in the country from 1980 to 1992. Many parents found a way to send their children to the US and other countries during that period. After a stroll through a market, we stopped for lunch, and had, of course, pupusas. Gerson shared many interesting Salvadoran quirks. For example, the Spanish word for dog is perro. Except, that is not the word used in El Salvador. A dog is a chucho.
After lunch we resumed the walking tour. Cindy and I struggled a bit because it was 87 degrees and sunny-we were not used to that. We skipped the last few things on the tour and headed to our air-conditioned hotel. We later had a nice dinner at the Cadejo brewery that was a two-block walk.
Day two of our tour was another volcano stop, this one at Cerro Verde. We also had a nice lunch on the shore of a beautiful natural lake in the shadow of the volcano. Our tour guide for this day was Jocelyn.
Day three of the tour was the Ruta Maya, where we saw old archaeological sites including pyramids from Mayan and other civilizations. Once again, it was a hot, sunny day. We had Gerson again as our guide, and on day four as well.
On day four of the tour, we had our bags packed when we were picked up in the morning. We were now on the Ruta de las Flores, a pretty drive through the coffee-growing region with many interesting little villages along the route. We stopped at Nahuizalco, a village with a vibrant market. We next stopped at a coffee plantation for a coffee tasting. We stopped at the village of Ataco, a town full of colorful murals. At our request, we skipped one of the village stops, so that we would have time to spend a few hours at the natural hot springs in the area. After the springs, our tour was over. EC drove us for about three hours to our next stop, the old colonial town of Suchitoto.
Our hotel in Suchitoto, Los Almendros de San Lorenzo, was wonderful. Our room was a suite. The hotel was all on one level, with only 7 or 8 rooms, and the interior (courtyard, restaurant area, etc.) was open air. We had dinner that night at a restaurant directly across the street. We had a great meal, in a charming atmosphere, at a very reasonable price.
The next morning, a guide from a local tour company arrived at our hotel to start our two-hour walking tour of Suchitoto. We heard a lot about the history of the area, including difficult stories during the civil war period. The father of our tour guide had been an officer with the guerrillas in the civil war. His dad was the youngest signer of the peace agreement to end the war.
Suchitoto reminded us of Antiqua, Guatemala, although Suchitoto is smaller. The city is very walkable, has a wonderful central plaza with trees and benches, a church on one side, and restaurants and other vendors on the other three sides.
By now, we had had pupusas in El Salvador three or four times. The pupusas in El Salvador are very tasty. My favorite pupusa was loroco con queso (cheese with a local flower that has a unique flavor.) While most pupusas are made of corn, you can also request a pupusa made of rice. That was nice for Cindy, who has a corn allergy. Pupuserias, restaurants that serve only pupusas, are everywhere, including at the sides of the road. We had one of our best meals in the country at a little pupuseria next to a park, a few blocks from our Suchitoto hotel. Our pupusas, plus one beer each, came in at $9!
A US-based tour company was starting a tour at the hotel, and we met a few of the people from that tour at breakfast and hanging at the hotel. We ended up having lunch with one of the individuals at a lovely place overlooking the nearby lake.
After asking the day before at the front desk, the hotel arranged for a massage in my room. The hotel staff set up the massage table, and a local independent provider did the massage. The hour and a half massage was excellent, and cost $40. Wow!
While I was having a massage, Cindy went to an indigo dye workshop. She dyed a scarf. She thoroughly enjoyed the class and the instructor.
After three nights, our EC driver arrived the next morning, and we started our 3-1/2 drive to the beach. We had to drive through the achingly congested traffic in San Salvador to reach the beach.
To say the least, this hotel and the whole vibe was quite a bit different than what we had expected. AI tools had suggested we might prefer the quieter San Blas beach, versus the El Tunco beach where all the young surfers hang out and where it is quite loud into the wee hours. The hotel right on San Blas beach seemed very reasonable based on the Expedia descriptions and pictures. We arrived at the hotel. There was not a front desk. A man who appeared to be with the hotel spoke to us in Spanish and pointed us to the restaurant near the beach. We went over there. While I could not understand what that lady was saying to me, I did pick up on “Expedia o booking.com numero de confirmación.” I had to look up my Expedia confirmation number. She then called someone, and was on the phone for five minutes, and then wrote information in a notebook. There were no computer terminals, just an old-fashioned notebook. She wrote down my passport information in the notebook. They then led us up a flight of stairs to our room. We did have a balcony with an ocean view, so that was nice. We arrived mid-afternoon and were hungry, so we had lunch at the hotel restaurant (outdoors by the beach). It was a reasonable lunch.
As best we could tell, we were the only guests at the hotel. We walked the beach. The beach itself was nice, but there were not many people. There were no foreigners, just locals. It was a black sand beach, due to the volcanoes nearby. We saw a wonderful sunset. Then it turned dark, and everything in the area shut down. Restaurants close by 7pm, there are no bars or anything else, so all you can do is hang in the hotel room and look out at the dark beach from the balcony.
Among other quirks, our hotel had no secondary lock mechanism on the door, and the sliding door to our balcony would not lock. The toilet leaked onto the floor. We had two lavatories in the bathroom; one did not work. There was no hot water. How could this be rated as a 3-star hotel? On the other hand, the breakfast was decent and the room was clean.
The next day we took an uber about ten minutes down the road. This was our second visit to a Cadejo brewery. The views from this location (an outdoor, covered restaurant) were spectacular, as we are on a cliff overlooking the ocean. We spent close to 3 hours there, staying out of the sun during the hottest part of the day. And we ended up with the same uber driver who took us back to our hotel.
By the next morning, we were ready to check out of the strange hotel. Our EC driver arrived right on schedule, and we made the one-hour drive to the San Salvador airport. We had access to a lounge at the airport. At the lounge, they made pupusas on request, so I had one last pupusa before leaving the country.
Adios, El Salvador. This was quite the experience. We were leaving 88-degree sunny weather and heading for two below wind chills in Milwaukee to be at our grandchild’s birthday. Thankfully, our flight, and our connecting flight in Miami, were on time.
Leave a Reply