Tourist First

Travel notes and advice from around the world. Above, the daily flight from Managua at the San Carlos, Nicaragua, airstrip.

Saturday, March 3, 2012

Nicaragua: A Garden of Eden

AT RIGHT, the Corredor de los Pintores leads to Maria Guevara Silva's inn.

In Ernesto Cardenal's landmark book "The Gospel in Solentiname," a teenager named Mariita contributed this to a discussion of the Beatitudes: "But a rich person who shares love has to share his goods, too. That's how he shows that he shares love. Because if he says he has love and doesn't share his goods, how are we going to believe him?"

That was then, in the late 1960 and early '70s. Today Mariita (Maria Guevara Silva) owns and operates an inn in the Solentiname Islands in Lake Nicaragua. Thanks to Father Cardenal's pioneering liberation theology and his unusual arts program, these islands remain a paradise for painters and a place apart in our materialistic world. You can visit them in my New York Times article (CLICK HERE): In Lush Nicaragua, Legacy of a Priest. Click HERE to go directly to the New York Times slideshow of my Solentiname photographs.