01 A hole a kilometre and a half wide
The San Salvador volcano rises west of the capital and its summit is occupied by an enormous crater, El Boquerón, roughly a kilometre and a half across. The rim sits at around 1,800 metres, and from there you see the whole valley with the city below.
The name says it plainly: a boquerón is a big gap. The walk from the car park to the viewpoint is short, and the effect on leaning over is that of looking into a vegetation-lined funnel with almost vertical walls.
02 The lagoon at the bottom
Through the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, the crater floor was not dry: it held a lagoon. The first known written mention is from 1807, when the intendant Antonio Gutiérrez y Ulloa described a small lagoon of sulphurous water with arid banks.
It became a local curiosity. Postcards of the period show it with a boat in the middle, and descending to the crater floor to row was an outing people made, one that survives in photographs.
03 June 1917
On 7 June 1917 a strong earthquake shook the capital, and the volcano then became active. The eruption did not come out of the main crater but from a point on the northern flank, producing a flow of material that advanced several kilometres in that direction.
Something else happened inside the Boquerón. The heat associated with the episode boiled the lagoon until it evaporated completely. When it was all over, the crater floor was dry, and it carried something that had not been there before.
04 The cone with a diminutive
In the lagoon’s place a cone of pyroclastic material had formed, about 30 metres high and some 120 across. A miniature volcano, with its own crater, inside the crater of a far larger one.
The name came from the language, not from geology: Boqueroncito. It is one of those diminutives that sums up a whole relationship with a place, and it explains rather well how people here live with a volcano still considered active though it has not erupted since.
05 How to see it
The crater is protected as El Boquerón National Park and is reached by car on a road climbing from Santa Tecla, about three quarters of an hour from the capital’s centre. From the car park to the viewpoint it is a few minutes of level walking.
Go up in the morning. Cloud settles on the summit from midday onwards almost all year and can erase the entire crater in minutes. And bring a layer: at 1,800 metres it is considerably cooler than down below.
