Ahuachapán
From Apaneca the road winds its way down to the city of
AHUACHAPÁN . This area, and the lands further north, are
some of the oldest inhabited regions of what is today El Salvador,
due in large part to the extremely fertile soil. Artefacts found in
the region date back to 1200 BC and the first early Maya.
Ahuachapán is also one of the oldest Spanish settlements in the
country, made a city in 1862, and has generally been a place of
quiet bourgeois comfort; two attacks by Guatemalan troops - in 1863
and 1864 - were both firmly rebutted. The early twentieth-century
British visitor Percy Martin noted: "The people as a whole seemed
to me to be very well-to-do, and evidences of refinement and solid
comfort were to be met with on all sides … I was also impressed
with the absence of the usual number of drinking shops, of which I
counted scarcely more than six in the whole town. The town is a
quiet, sleepy and eminently peaceful place of residence where one
might dream away one's life contentedly enough."
Today the city's main industry is geothermal electricity
generation, at one time supplying seventy percent of the country's
power; consequently there are usually a number of European and
Japanese technicians stationed here
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