Tegucigalpa Audioguides

Tegucigalpa was established in 1578 as a Spanish silver mining camp in a valley in the mountains of central Honduras, and the name, depending on which etymological tradition you follow, means either 'silver hills' or 'place of painted rocks' in the Nahuatl of the indigenous inhabitants. It grew slowly around the mines and the churches built to serve the miners, and became Honduras's permanent capital only in 1880 after decades of alternating with Comayagua. It is the only capital in Central America that is not on the Pan-American Highway, which is partly an accident of geography and partly explains why Tegucigalpa has a more isolated, compressed character than the region's other capitals.

The old center of the city sits at about 1,000 meters elevation in a bowl of mountains that give it a moderate climate significantly cooler than the Honduran coast.

The Parque Central is anchored by the Cathedral of Saint Michael the Archangel, a baroque structure with an elaborate facade of columns and ornamental stone that has been worked on for three centuries, and the square in front of it functions as the social center of the city in the Latin American tradition, with street vendors, couples on benches, and the political arguments that animate any capital plaza. The San Francisco church, two blocks east, dates to around 1590 and is the oldest standing structure in the city.