Laguna de Alegría: a green crater lake in the east

Most visitors to El Salvador work the western circuit — Ruta de Las Flores, Santa Ana, Coatepeque — and never go east. Alegría is the argument for going east.

The town first

Alegría sits at roughly 1,200 m on the flank of the Tecapa volcano, which makes it one of the coldest towns in the country. Evenings need a jacket. It is known for flower nurseries — the cool damp climate suits them — and the streets are lined with them, which is how it earned the nickname the flower garden of El Salvador.

It is small, painted, and walkable in an hour. Sit in the square, order a coffee, and notice how different the pace is from the western towns that have adapted to tour buses.

The lagoon

The Laguna de Alegría sits in a crater above the town, a short drive or a steep walk up. The water is an opaque green-turquoise, and unlike Coatepeque the colour is constant: it comes from dissolved sulphur and minerals seeping in from the volcano below, not from a bloom.

You will smell it before you reach it. That faint sulphur note is the volcano still being active underneath — there are warm seeps around parts of the shore where the ground is noticeably hot.

Swimming is not the point here and is generally discouraged; the mineral content is high and conditions vary. Come to walk the rim, which takes under an hour, and to look at a colour of water you will not see in the west.

The legend

Local telling has it that a siguanaba haunts the lagoon and lures men into the water. Every crater lake in Central America has a story like this attached. Ask two people in Alegría and you will get two versions, both delivered with total conviction.

Why bother going east

Fewer people. On a weekday morning you may have the rim to yourself, which is not something anyone will promise you at Cerro Verde in high season. Pair it with Santiago de María or the Tecapa coffee slopes and you have a day nobody else on your flight will have had.