by Justin Haring
For over 24 years, one man in the Department of Estelí has been chipping away at the side of a mountain, carving faces, scenes, and images that have shaped his worldview into the tough stone. Today his work stretches across the entire facade of the exposed outcrop of rock covering over a hundred square meters of the mountainside. The place is relatively unknown but still manages to get visits from handfuls of tourists year-round, as the artist’s guestbook indicates.

Don Alberto Gutierrez is a tall skinny man with fair skin and a shock of wild white hair. He smokes cigarettes, which he says is the only vice that he has not been able to overcome, because they help him to see clearly in his mind the things that he has to carve out. His story starts like so many others of his generation, in poverty, destitution and wanton drunkenness. All of this changed for him suddenly when he says he had a vision from God that instructed him to give up the bottle and begin what he calls his “labors” on the cliff face.