Honduras Map
I painted this map of Honduras with watercolors and Copic markers.
Updated September 29, 2026
Painted for Coconut Train to Cuero y Salado
Stories from Honduras: Cuero y Salado
Honduras is the second-largest country in Central America, after Nicaragua, and on this map it is a broad green wedge pressed between two seas. The long side is the Caribbean coast, which runs from the Gulf of Honduras, near the border with Guatemala, east past Tela, La Ceiba and Trujillo to Cabo Falso and the edge of the Mosquitia. The short side is a sliver of Pacific shore below Choluteca, on a gulf Honduras shares with El Salvador and Nicaragua. Nearly everything between them is mountain. Tegucigalpa, the capital, sits in a highland valley near La Tigra National Park, and most Hondurans live in the interior basins or along the north coast, around San Pedro Sula and the old banana ports.
Off the north coast lie the Bay Islands, Roatán, Utila and Guanaja, at the southern end of the great Mesoamerican Reef, with the small Cayos Cochinos closer to shore. Behind La Ceiba, the Nombre de Dios range climbs straight out of the coastal plain into the cloud forests of Pico Bonito National Park, and just west of it, Cuero y Salado National Park protects a remnant of the mangroves and swamps that once lined the whole coast. Inland, Lake Yojoa, the largest natural lake in the country, lies at the foot of the cloud-forested mountains of Azul Meámbar National Park. In the dry valleys around Olanchito lives the Honduran emerald, a hummingbird found nowhere else on Earth.
East of Trujillo, where Columbus came ashore on his fourth voyage in 1502, the map empties out. The roads give way to the rivers, lagoons and pine savannas of the Mosquitia, to Brus Laguna and Puerto Lempira, and to the rainforests of Patuca National Park, some of the wildest country left in Central America.
The Road to Cuero y Salado
I painted this map to go with The Last Coconut Train to Cuero y Salado, my story of riding one of the last working pieces of the old fruit-company railways out to the mangroves west of La Ceiba. I stayed at the foot of Pico Bonito, walking its trails with local guides. For the country to the south, see my Nicaragua map.