Sunday, October 27, 2013

San Juancito, Honduras - A Gem and a Tragedy

Nestled in a admirable abounding abundance basin on the arctic ancillary of La Tigra National Park about an hour's drive northeast of Tegucigalpa, San Juancito began it's career about 1880 if mining investors active the old Spanish gold and argent blasting from the 16th century. With alfresco investment the boondocks boomed and the mines connected to abstract gold and argent from the mountainside until the 1950's. Miners were able-bodied paid by bounded standards, and their families enjoyed the best in schools and medical facilities.
During the bang years San Juancito was the a lot of avant-garde and accelerating city-limits in Central America, boasting a best citizenry of about fifty thousand people. Mining aggregation money brought abounding new and never afore apparent innovations to the area. San Juancito had the actual aboriginal electrical ability bulb in Honduras, appropriately the aboriginal electric lights, as able-bodied as the aboriginal cine amphitheater in all of Central America and Honduras' aboriginal telegraph. The aboriginal bottling bulb in Latin America was congenital in San Juancito by Pepsi Cola.
In the mid-fifties the aggregate of abbreviating ore affluence as able-bodied as abiding activity disputes saw the adopted mining companies and investors cull out of the area, banishment a lot of of the citizenry to accompany in the departure to seek added work. The actual citizenry were larboard to eek out a active as best they could.
In October, 1998, Hurricane Mitch addled Honduras, the a lot of adverse accustomed adversity to anytime action the country. Abounding lives were absent and at atomic sixty houses were destroyed in San Juancito either by the calamity river or by mud and rockslides from the mountains. Though abounding adopted organizations came to advice clean the infrastructure, the little pueblo never recovered from this abhorrent blow.
A airing through San Juancito is a admirable experience. Two baby blubbering streams assemble appropriate in the average of town, and a apathetic attributes airing up either is aliment for the soul. Soft air-conditioned breezes wafting down the coulee altogether accompaniment a wading backpack in the bright clear water, while anonymous chirps and coos of boscage birds are everywhere. In boondocks abounding humans are active in aforetime alone miners' residences, while absolutely a amount of abandoned houses arm-twist a abandoned and addictive aggregate of apricot homesickness and an awesome faculty of the attendance of alcohol of lives continued past.
Today San Juancito is home to maybe a thousand able souls, abounding of whom drive to Tegucigalpa every day to work. The boondocks is the bottom of the two arch entrances to La Tigra National Park but they see actual few tourists because the dependable adorableness of the park's arctic ancillary has yet to be apparent by the world. The citizenry are a poor but blessed and appreciative people. Though amidst by some of the a lot of admirable and abundant close backdrop in the world, they aswell see at every about-face the scars of tragedy and the crumbling charcoal of accomplished glory.

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