Honduras

Honduras faces two oceans unequally. A long Caribbean shore runs across the north, while the Pacific reaches it only at the Gulf of Fonseca. The interior is mountain: pine ridges, coffee valleys, the cloud forest of Celaque and Lake Yojoa among the central hills. The Patuca winds through La Mosquitia, a roadless eastern wilderness of rainforest and lagoons, and offshore the Bay Islands of Roatán, Utila and Guanaja sit on the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef.

The Maya city of Copán flourished in the far west until the ninth century, leaving carved stelae and a stairway inscribed with some two thousand glyphs. Columbus sailed this coast in 1502, and the Lenca leader Lempira held out against the Spanish until the late 1530s. Independence from Spain came in 1821. From about 1900 American fruit companies built railways and ports along the north coast, and O. Henry, who had stayed in Trujillo, coined the phrase ‘banana republic’. Hurricane Mitch devastated the country in 1998.

On the Caribbean coast live the Garifuna, descended from Africans and Caribs whom Britain deported from St Vincent to Roatán in 1797; their punta dance and drumming are honoured by UNESCO. A baleada, a flour tortilla folded over beans, cream and cheese, is the everyday street food. Highland smallholders grow coffee for export, the north coast grows bananas and oil palm, and garment factories in the Sula Valley sew clothing for American brands, shipped through Puerto Cortés.