Honduras: a Cultural View

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Shedrick Williams

2013

Honduras: A Cultural View

A Cultural View into the Spanish speaking nation of Honduras

Chicago State University

Spanish 1010

Victoria Shen, Professor

1/8/2013

Honduras, officially Republic of Honduras, Spanish República de Honduras ,  country of Central America situated between Guatemala and El Salvador to the west and Nicaragua to the south and east. The Caribbean Sea washes its northern coast, the Pacific Ocean its narrow coast to the south. Its area includes the offshore Caribbean department of the Bay Islands. The capital is Tegucigalpa . The bulk of the population of Honduras lives a generally isolated existence in the mountainous interior, a fact that may help to explain the rather insular policy of the country in relation to Latin and Central American affairs. Honduras, like its neighbours in the region, is a developing nation whose citizens are presented with innumerable economic and social challenges, a situation that is complicated by rough topography and the occasional violence of tropical weather patterns, including the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Mitch in 1998.

More than three-fourths of the land area of Honduras is mountainous, lowlands being found only along the coasts and in the several river valleys that penetrate toward the interior. The interior takes the form of a dissected upland with numerous small peaks. The main surface features have a general east-west orientation. The southwestern mountains, the Volcanic Highlands, consist of alternating layers of rock composed of dark, volcanic detritus and lava flows, both of middle to early Cenozoic age. The northern mountains in other regions are more ancient, with granite and crystalline rocks predominating.

Honduras has been inhabited since well before the 1st century a.d. The ruins at Copán in western Honduras indicate that the area was the centre of Mayan civilization before the Maya migrated to the...