Honduras is packed with spectacular natural splendors that range through highlands shrouded in clouds, deeply green jungles, sweeping, symmetrical volcanoes, and Caribbean beaches of pristine powder. The country also has some of Mesoamerica’s most bedazzling Mayan remains. And Honduras’ people, Tomás Mur, a 19th-century resident, observed, are “poets by sentiment and artists by nature.”
The country’s “climate, origins, skies, and mountains,” Mur wrote, “speak constantly of fantasy.” We relish experiencing such fantasies—beaching on the secluded coast of La Mosquitia, exploring the emerald wildlands of Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve (a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the great jungles of the Western Hemisphere) and hiking in misty stillness among the pine forests of the soaring Sierra de Agalta. As for Mayan bedazzlements, we explore the resonant ruins at Copán, the empire’s greatest artistic center (and a UNESCO World Heritage Site). Archeologist and Mayanist Sylvanus Morley praised this city as the “Athens of the New World.”
Guatemala and Honduras
Highlights: Antigua, Chichicastenango, Lake Atitlán, Santiago Atitlán, Copán, Yaxha, Tikal
