Convento y Museo San Francisco

The oldest church in Central America and the most striking building in Granada (that is to say, Nicaragua) boasts the big blue birthday cake facade of Iglesia San Francisco which, incidentally, houses the region's best museum.

The museum is through the small door on the left, where guides (some of whom speak English) are available for tours; tips are appreciated. Museum highlights include top-notch primitivist art, a scale model of the city and a tribe of papier-mâché Indians cooking, relaxing in hammocks and frolicking on comelazatoaztegams, a sort of a 360-degree see-saw.

The reason why you're here, however, is the Zapatera statuary, two solemn black basalt statues carved between AD 800 and 1200, then left behind on the ritual island of Zapatera. Most were discovered by US diplomat Ephraim Squier and Swedish scientist Carl Bollivius in the late 1880s and gathered in Granada in the 1920s.