Granada, Nicaragua

There are only nine rooms at the Casa San Francisco, but that means nine stories passing through.  

A hotel can say a lot about a city.  And a lot can be said about a city by the type of tourist it attracts.  This thought has been on my mind for eight years now; I'm old enough to have seen places change dramatically.  Now, as we roll into Granada, fresh from Nicaragua's pacific coast, this thought is on my mind more than ever. 

Granada, Nicaragua is the oldest occupied colonial city in the New World.  Its buildings reveal five hundred years of chipped paint.  It is among a small handful of America’s most enchanting cities. 

Those old paint-strokes are the hues of Central America: lime, rose, mango, deep yellow.  The city sits aside Lake Nicaragua, known for its large size, for its numerous islands populated by tasteless homes or unruly monkeys, for smoky volcanoes protruding from its mid-section, for its sharks.  Scientists believed these sharks had long been isolated from the ocean by this lake, transformed by time into a freshwater species.  But no, these are bull sharks, inland-waterway breeders, visiting from the Caribbean. They make the trek along the riverine border of Nicaragua and Costa Rica into this lake.

When we arrive at the hotel, we are informed that Terry, the hotel's co-owner, wants to meet us right away.  We are mistaken for being famous, or important.  'No,' I tell the hotel manager, 'we're not with Moon Handbooks.  You've got the wrong people.'  The hotel manager says, 'Oh, just tell people you are, it works around here.'