by Richard Leonardi
Doña Rosa’s knees began to bleed. She did not notice. The ground-in wounds from walking on her knees, the brilliant sun, and dizzying heat inside a breathless church made Doña Rosa’s head spin and her knees numb, immune to all but her goal.
When she reached the altar, stained black with the smoke of candles, Doña Rosa began to weep, her sobs punctuating the prayer she has recited for more than half a century. Doña Rosa raised her head and gazed through a fog of tears at the image of the Virgin. She was not alone.
Nicaragua’s devotion to the Virgin Mary or la Virgen María is historic, profound, and very much alive. It could be said that the Virgin Mary holds more emotional and spiritual importance in Nicaragua than in any other country in the world. Nicaragua has several unique celebrations to the Virgin and two of them in December commemorate María’s Immaculate Conception of Jesus Christ. The most renowned is La Purísima or Gritería, a centuries-old tradition that’s uniquely Nicaraguan.

by Ronald Betancourt, M.Sc. 

Zapatera Island in Lake Nicargaua, with an area of 52 square kilometers, is the second largest island in the lake after Ometepe. It is believed that it once was an active volcano given the evidence of volcanic formations from its base to the heights of 625 meters. It has tropical rainforest vegetation and several rocky streams. Some of the land is ideal for cattle ranching.

This eroded ancient volcano formed on the volcanic fracture of Nicaragua’s Pacific, possibly even before Lake Nicaragua was formed. It is roughly rectangular in shape, with the longest diagonal 11 kilometers in length. Rocky peninsulas jut out from its shores. The shoreline is very broken with rock outcroppings and numerous coves. Some anthropologists believe that the island was a sanctuary or ceremonial site for the original inhabitants of the land, mainly of Chorotega origin.

by  Mary Helen Espinosa

During one week of commuting up and down the La Concha roadway, I jotted down 16 different names proudly emblazoned on the rear windows of the express vans (inter-urbanos)  running between cities.   From the humble, “Un Regalo de Dios” (a gift from God),  to the arrogant, “El Malo” (the bad one),  the vans often take on personalities of their drivers or of their transportation cooperatives.  Some are obviously statements of identity like “Un Chanchunchito Mas” and “Ojitos Bellos,” while others leave doubt “El Intelectual,” “El Astuto,” “Golden Boy,” and  “El Angelito.”  My favorites express vans, of course, are those from which you should wisely keep at a safe distance: “El Titánico (El Camino al Cielo),””El Fugitivo,” “Tu Peor Pesadillo,” (your worst nightmare) and my all-time favorite “El Ciego”(the blind).

by Carl Slugger

The traveler experiencing Nicaraguan culture encounters endless paradoxes. The cathedral dominates every town square, but the disco a block away features dance styles based on stimulated sex, for example. Or the keen Latin sense of honor in nations governed by systems of chicanery. Nicas are a laid back, take come-what-may people-who produce prize fighters who can take your head off.

If you’re familiar with baseball, take in a Nicaraguan game to experience one more paradox. A game that was called the leisure pastime, Nica style. Try Masayas’ Estadio Roberto Clemente, a brick and masonry piece of nostalgia reminiscent of the old style American stadiums Wrigley Field or Fenway Park, set on the rim of Laguna Masaya with a sweeping view of the lake. The stadium is divided into three sections. The center section, behind home plate, is the most expensive (less than $2). The right field line bench seating is for the fans of the home team, left for visitors. Each of the sections is divided by fences and barbed-wire to prevent clashes between opposing fans. In some parks the visitor’s bus is in a fenced-off area. In the past, fans have overturned and burned buses if the home team lost the game.

by Mike Sabine 

You see them everywhere, hawked in plastic bags in the town square, consumed by the glass at restaurantes corrientes, ladled out of buckets by street vendors. The ubiquitous refresco naturale. Since before Columbus, Central Americans have been craftily converting seemingly every fruit, vegetable and seed that grows into tasty drinks, and no visit to the region is complete without sampling the amazing variety of these libations. 

Not only do they quench the thirst and satisfy the sweet tooth, and depending on whose old family recipe it’s made from, they have curative properties as well. Had one too many at the bar last night? The nectar of the sweet/tart red pitaya fruit will set that de goma (hangover - literally means ‘gummed- up’) situation straight. And you may as well get your kidneys back in shape, so knock back a tall glass of linaza. And according to local folk experts, tamarindo will ease the sore throat, help digestion and benefit seemingly every organ. 

by Dean McKinley

Hola mis companeros. Allow me to relate to you a fable for our times. As with all fables, it is more true than less, as well as having a moral.

Once upon a time not so long ago or very far away, there was a sleepy little fishing village situated on a beautiful bay along the coast. The sea and the land were rich and the people lived comfortably on the resources abundant around them. Their needs were met simply and they required only the basics of creature comforts. However it was on a bay, so it had a harbor and in time entrepreneurs came and where once were only panga fishermen, now were big commercial fishing boats and on-land fish processing facilities as well as commercial shipping concerns. Now there were jobs. And while the work was hard, at least the people of the village had at last the effectivo (money) with which to improve their lot somewhat. This meant, however, giving up a way of life that had sustained them and their families for generations only to emerge, in the words of the sociologist Joseph Wood Krutch, “from something like destitution to find themselves all too soon immersed in all the problems, pressures and perplexities of modern civilization.”

Salomón de la Selva was born in León on March 20, 1893 and died February 5, 1959 in Paris. This poet ranks right up there on the Nicaraguan pantheon of poetry with , Carlos Martínez Rivas, Pablo Antonio Cuadra, and others. He lived most of his life outside of Nicaragua. Poets are wont to form movements of literary revolution. Modernism, post-modernism, vanguard. De la Selva at one point coined the term neo-popularism for his kind of poetry. For a time he also adhered to a school of philosophy called “arielism” that proclaimed to go beyond both socialism and anti-imperialism, popular ideas among many in the early part of the 20th century.

Salomón, educated in the USA, wrote bilingually. He was friends with Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ezra Pound, and other contemporaries and as such mingled in what were considered radical thinking circles in those days. A romantic revolutionary, he volunteered in 1917 to fight in World War I and saw that conflagration to its end.

by Pat Werner
For many English speakers, the Spanish language of Nicaragua is a rich cacophony of a regional dialect that is little like textbook Spanish and quite different from Mexican Spanish; a dialect that contains many slang words common only to Nicaragua and unlike the slang of Costa Rica or Honduras. Even for some Spanish speakers, the arcane use of 17th century verb forms and pronouns can take a little getting used to.

What makes things more interesting is that imbedded in spoken Nicaraguan Spanish are words that are remnants from ancient languages spoken in Nicaragua when the Spaniards came barreling through western Nicaragua in the early 16th century. Words like caite, piche, and chompipe, for example, are not found in any dictionary of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language, but they are alive and well used in Nicaragua.