San Salvador Audio Tours

San Salvador was founded in 1525 and has been relocated and rebuilt from scratch so many times that the concept of starting over is embedded in the city's DNA. The current location in the Boquerón volcano valley was established in 1545 after earlier sites were destroyed by earthquakes, and the destructive 1986 earthquake killed over a thousand people and flattened much of the center that had been rebuilt after previous disasters. Surrounded by five volcanoes, the city sits on geological ground that takes nothing for granted, and the Salvadorans who rebuilt it repeatedly have developed a stubborn relationship with impermanence.

The historic downtown around the Plaza Gerardo Barrios holds the most significant concentration of the city's heritage.

The Teatro Nacional de El Salvador, completed in 1917, is the oldest continuously operating theater in Central America. The Metropolitan Cathedral faces the plaza, notable for its exterior ceramic tile mural by artist Fernando Llort that decorated the facade for decades before being controversially removed in 2012, a loss that still provokes debate in the city. The National Palace, built between 1905 and 1911, contains four ceremonial rooms in different architectural styles and is one of the few civic buildings to have survived the city's cyclical destructions.