Jinotega

Introducing Jinotega

The City of Mists, this is one of those places kept pristine by conflict, where high-altitude forests have hidden warriors within their dramatic ridges and gorges since at least AD 596, when the first Náhuatl-speaking people arrived. They called this valley Xinotoga, the Place of Refuge, the Eternal City, embraced in green and granite peaks ascending another 200m into the sky all around.

First settled by the Spanish in the 1500s, Jinotega's architecture remains well preserved, if pockmarked by bulletholes here and there; it saw some of the heaviest fighting in the revolution and Contra War. But when the mists flow through the cobbled streets, blurring the harsh lines of reality, it is almost as though there was always peace in this most poignantly beautiful of places.

Peace has arrived, and Jinotega is beginning to receive a trickle of visitors from the steaming lowlands to this rarified world, with good hotels and restaurants at the gateway to an almighty swath of almost untried nature.

Last updated: Oct 1, 2008