El Salvador is not the most popular destination for art lovers. It’s understandable- smaller countries tend to have less interesting stuff in their museum collections. MARTE, San Salvador’s art museum, is no exception to the rule. Most of the art there is pretty bad. But it’s an amusing experience nevertheless- every item has a price tag, just as if they’d be happy to sell their whole collection.
Wandering around these weird pieces of art, we already knew that there was a village famous for a naive painter, Fernando Llort. Again, thanks to my limited understanding of naive art, it didn’t really invite me to explore. But when I ended up in front of a Llort painting in the museum, something shifted inside of me. I realised I quite like naive art, or to be more precise, Fernando Llort’s work. The cute geometric animals and sizzling bright colours really drew my attention. “We have to go to that village,” I said to Tom, eyes still glued to Llort’s picture.
So it went that our next destination was La Palma, a tiny village in the mountains, a rabbit hop away from the Honduran border. Our mission: to find the art.
A little boy who drew maps
Fernando Llort was not actually born in La Palma, the village which is now so famous for his art. He was born in capital San Salvador. Llort couldn’t hide his artistic talent for long. As soon his teachers noticed that the boy could draw, they instructed him to draft maps in Geography classes.
The talented boy went to study architecture. As a young man, his studies took him to France, Belgium and the USA. Unfortunately, he chose a bad time to return to his homeland, El Salvador. He was welcomed by political and social unrest that eventually lead to civil war. To escape from all that, he, and a bunch of other artists, moved to La Palma. They made money with their art and taught the villagers to draw and paint. As a result of that, there’s hardly a wall or a lamppost without a mural in this tiny town.
La Palma: art is everywhere you look
If you love cute colourful murals of houses, birds, and animals, that remind of the works of Miro and Picasso, then the chances are high that you will walk against a pole, or step in front of a car, while trying to capture all of it with your camera. At one point I was so immersed into art that I forgot that I was in fact in the middle of a street and not in an art gallery.
But where in La Palma should you look if you want to find Llort’s art? Luckily you don’t have to go in any specific spot. The murals are literally everywhere. They decorate the pavilions and park benches, they are drawn on the houses, basketball backboards and lamp posts and, of course, the local church is also decorated with Llort’s works.
Normally, I don’t really fancy seeing contemporary art in churches, but Llort’s interpretation of the Way of the Cross was really cute.
It’s actually advisable to check out churches in El Salvador. Their chalk-white facades hide a parade of lights pouring onto shiny floors, church benches carved of dark wood and so many fresh flowers. After the rooms stuffed with plastic chairs that were called churches in Belize and Guatemala, we were pleasantly surprised.
Tom is enjoying the sunshine in the park.
But back to Llort. Things to check out in the village are the church and the park in front of it. The park has cute white benches covered with mosaics, resembling the Park Guell in Barcelona. Also, it’s a nice idea to go to the viewing platform that is a little walk away from the city centre but offers lovely views to the surrounding mountains.
A little detour to the mountains
If you want to see more mountains, then the highest point of El Salvador Cerro El Pital (2730m) is a day trip away. Thinking back conquering this peak I cannot remember any exhaustion or climbing at all- so it must be that the guidebook was right, and the hike up there was really easy. Also, on the way into the forest, you could see an insignificant little rock, that was a border stone of Honduras and El Salvador.
Actually, we have no idea if we made it to the top or not. My only memory of it is that the summit was caged with a high fence behind which half a dozen bloodthirsty dogs were barking, growling and showing their sharp unwelcoming teeth. As you may imagine, we didn’t take too long to find the way back down.
There we met a friendly local who took us to a next bloodcurdling sight- a huge rock that could be accessed only by taking a nerve-racking log bridge. If we would have fallen here, we would not have been fine, since the fall was approximately 25m. Now, I have seen a fair amount of log bridges before. That’s the way to cross rivers in jungles. But this one was truly too high for me. I said no to this adventure and waited on the safe ground until the local guy and Tom walked over the log like acrobats.
Santa’s workshop
Falling darkness ended the devoted art-lovers pilgrimage to murals. So we decided to check out the souvenir stalls. After all, Llort’s things were really cute, and what would have been a better gift to bring from El Salvador than local crafts, right? But to our disappointment, we couldn’t find a single souvenir we liked. Yes, there was a lot of stuff with Llort’s pictures, but on the whole, these things looked cheap and quite ugly. I didn’t feel like buying anything from there.
Next day, we went looking for Llort’s museum. According to the guidebook, there was an arts centre which had a little museum. We were walking around for it for a quite long time, but couldn’t find any arts centre or museum. But in the end, we stumbled upon something even better. A real Santa’s workshop. Okay, I’m exaggerating quite a lot here. It was still Llort’s workshop, but the kind lady who showed us around said that they had busy times right now, because they had a lot of orders before Christmas. One country where they export a lot is Italy. For some reason Italians really love crosses.
And it did remind me of Santa’s workshop. There was a man who was cutting all the shapes from wood, and in the next room, we came across a little lady with glasses hunched over a wooden detail holding a tiny brush on her hand. She was colouring the pieces. But what were the pieces and things I’m talking about? Well, there’s a lot of jewellery, Christmas decorations, domino sets and wooden boxes in all sizes. And then, of course, the crosses that I imagine must be hanging on every Italian’s walls. Surely I’m going to keep my eyes open during our next trip to Italy.
More souvenirs that we could carry home.
Of course, we couldn’t leave without souvenir shopping. I picked up a couple of colourful Christmas decorations that reminded weird mythological creatures. I bought them as gifts to my family knowing well enough that we’ll be not back to Europe before Christmas.
We also found a domino set with Llort characters, that was fun to play when we had some time to kill, and a necklace. Tom bought a tiny box for his sister.
The workshop finished our stay in El Salvador. We said goodbye to the coffee, Pacific ocean, and to the volcanoes, squeezed ourselves into an already very full bus on the street corner, and headed north towards our next destination- Honduras.
ONWARDS FROM LA PALMA
- For more mountains and to get to know indigenous Lenca people, head to Gracias or Esperanza in Honduras.
To get there, take bus number 119 to the border at El Poy and cross the border on foot. Then wait for the bus towards Ocotepeque (or jump in an inexpensive shared taxi). From Ocotopeque, you can get to Gracias via Santa Rosa de Copán. - Or go straight towards cobalt-coloured lake Yojoa and treat yourself with a craft beer in the jungle.
- In the other direction, you can jump on a bus to pretty Suchitoto or cosmopolitan San Salvador.
Bus 119 runs between San Salvador and the Honduran and passses La Palma. Change to bus 163 in Las Aguileras for Suchitoto.