Car Hire San Salvador - Mini guide to San Salvador

The smallest and most densely populated country in Central America, El Salvador is chiefly remembered for the vicious civil war of the 1980s. But like Guatemala, it’s a tenacious country and easily accessed, you can surf at the Pacific, or climb an active volcano, in the same day.

El Salvador's capital, San Salvador, lies in a valley at the foot of the large San Salvador volcano. The city's central landmark is the domed Catedral Metropolitana, where Archbishop Oscar Romero is buried. The cathedral faces onto the principal plaza, the Plaza Barrios. Nearby, the red-velvet opulence of the Teatro Nacional dates from 1917. Its sensuous ceiling mural is continued into the nearby Teatro Cafe.

The city has two markets, the Mercado Ex-Cuartel for handicrafts, hand-woven textiles and ceramics, and the Mercado Central which sells everything from bruised fruit to Velcro gun holsters. Jardín Botánico La Laguna is an attractive garden built on what was once a swamp at the bottom of a volcanic crater.

Due south of Zacatecoluca lies El Salvador's premier beach playground, the Costa del Sol, a fifteen-kilometre strip of palm-fringed beaches running between the ocean and the Jaltepeque Estuary. While driving a hired car, take the road which branches off 8kms before the coast to the fishing town of La Herradura, from where boats can be rented to explore the estuary's mangrove swamps and small islands, some of them inhabited.

Where the borders of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala converge, is the Montecristo cloud forest, consisting of oak and laurel trees that form an impenetrable canopy to the sunlight. The combination of high levels of rain and elevation (2400m) – make for ideal conditions for a cloud forest biosphere rich with ferns, orchids, mushrooms and mosses that coat the forest floor.

Northeast of San Salvador, is the most important Mayan discovery in the last few years, Joya de Cern, which was declared as a Heritage for Humanity by UNESCO. This enigmatic village is worth an afternoon marvelling at the Mayan Empire that ruled from Mexico to El Salvador almost two millenniums ago.

El Salvador is a hub for Central American air transport: It has connections to all major cities in the region, plus flights to US cities such as Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York and San Francisco.