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Updated: May 28, 2025
After Rancho Chiquito, the first town which is reached in the plain of Comayagua, entering it from this direction, is Lamani, a small village, it is true, but delightfully situated in an open meadow, relieved only by fruit-trees and the stems of the nopal or palmated cactus, which here grows to a gigantic size, frequently reaching the height of twenty or thirty feet.
From Lamani to Comayagua the road is direct, over a slightly undulating plain, subsiding gently to the north, and traversed nearly in its centre by the Rio Hanuya, fed by numerous tributaries falling from the mountains on either hand.
You will see, if your map be accurate, that in or near that pass two large rivers have their rise; one, the Humuya, flows almost due north into the Atlantic, and the other, the Goascoran, nearly due south into the Pacific, together constituting, with the plain of Comayagua, a great transverse valley extending across the continent from sea to sea.
At its northeastern extremity, its white walls now gleaming like silver in the sunlight, and anon subdued and distant under the shadow of a passing cloud, was the city of Comayagua, unmistakable, from its size, but especially from the imposing mass of its cathedral, as the principal town of the plain, and the capital of the Republic.
Then, for the first time, I saw the great plain of Comayagua, at a level some hundreds of feet below us, spreading away for a distance of forty miles, in a rich succession of savannas and cultivated grounds, dotted with villages, and intersected by dark waving lines of forest, marking the courses of the various streams that traverse it like the veins on an out-spread hand.
Not far beyond we came out on the edge of a tableland with a splendid view of the valley of Comayagua, far below, almost dead level, some ten miles wide and thirty long, deep green everywhere, with cloud shadows giving beautiful color effects across it in the jumble of green mountains with the purple tinge of distance beyond which lay Tegucigalpa.
Comayagua by day was a lazy, silent place, chiefly barefoot, the few possessors of shoes being gaudily dressed young men whose homes were earth-floored huts. The place had the familiar Central American air of trying to live with the least possible exertion; its people were a mongrel breed running all the gamut from black to near-white.
We nevertheless made out that the mouth of a river or estero, laid down in Sir Edward Belcher's chart, on the opposite side of the bay in front of La Union, was really that of the river Goascoran, a considerable stream having its rise at a point due north, and not far from Comayagua, the capital of Honduras, which, we also ascertained, was seated in the midst of a great plain, bearing the same name.
A monotonous wide path full of loose stones led through dry, breathless jungle across the valley floor to Comayagua.
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