Santa Ana Volcano

Santa Ana, also known as Ilamatepec, is the highest volcano in El Salvador, rising to 2,381 metres in the west of the country. Its broad summit holds four craters and calderas nested one inside another, and at the bottom of the innermost lies a small crater lake. From the rim the view takes in the neighbouring cones of Izalco and Cerro Verde, with the great Coatepeque Caldera immediately to the east.

Santa Ana is a stratovolcano on the Central American Volcanic Arc, and its history includes episodes of enormous violence. In the late Pleistocene — no more than about 57,000 years ago — the summit collapsed, sending a vast debris avalanche all the way to the Pacific coast, where its deposits formed the Acajutla Peninsula. Later eruptions gradually rebuilt the cone. Activity has been recorded repeatedly since the 16th century, both at the summit and from vents on the lower flanks: in 1722 lava from the San Marcelino vents to the east flowed some 11 kilometres and buried the village of San Juan Tecpan. The most recent eruption, in October 2005, threw rocks the size of cars more than a kilometre and a half from the crater and killed at least two people; the previous one had come in 1904.

The volcano's upper slopes have a cool subtropical highland climate, dry from November to April and heavily rained on in the summer months. Popular tradition in El Salvador links the volcano with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, whose Salvadoran wife Consuelo is said to have inspired the rose of The Little Prince — and, the story goes, Santa Ana inspired one of the little active volcanoes on the prince's planet.

Getting there

The volcano rises in Santa Ana department, about 17 km south-west of the city of Santa Ana and about 13 km from the town of Izalco. El Salvador International Airport (SAL) is about 77 km away in a straight line; the older Ilopango airport (ILS) in San Salvador, about 58 km away, no longer handles international flights.