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AHUACHAPAN |
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 From Apaneca the road winds its way down to the city of AHUACHAPÁN .
This area, and the lands further north, are some of the oldest inhabited
regions of what is today El Salvador, due in large part to the extremely
fertile soil. Artefacts found in the region date back to 1200 BC and the
first early Maya. Ahuachapán is also one of the oldest Spanish
settlements in the country, made a city in 1862, and has generally been
a place of quiet bourgeois comfort; two attacks by Guatemalan troops -
in 1863 and 1864 - were both firmly rebutted. The early twentieth-century
British visitor Percy Martin noted: "The people as a whole seemed to me
to be very well-to-do, and evidences of refinement and solid comfort
were to be met with on all sides & I was also impressed with the absence
of the usual number of drinking shops, of which I counted scarcely more
than six in the whole town. The town is a quiet, sleepy and eminently
peaceful place of residence where one might dream away one's life
contentedly enough."
Today the city's main industry is geothermal electricity generation, at
one time supplying seventy percent of the country's power; consequently
there are usually a number of European and Japanese technicians
stationed here
The City
Apart from its quiet, gently fading streets, and the lively daily market
around the bus station, the only things to see in Ahuachapán are its
churches . The imposing white edifice of the Iglesia Parroquia de
Nuestra Señora
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