Pepián stew with turkey and roasted pumpkin seeds, fresh tortillas off a comal in the market, and Volcán de Agua's perfect cone framing every cobblestone street from the plaza
Antigua Guatemala (La Muy Noble y Muy Leal Ciudad de Santiago de los Caballeros de Guatemala, the colonial capital, UNESCO World Heritage 1979) is the most intact Spanish colonial city in the Americas — a flat grid of pastel-painted colonial mansions, Baroque churches, and cathedral ruins, surrounded by three active volcanoes on three sides: Volcán de Agua (3,766m, perfect cone to the south), Volcán Acatenango (3,976m, northwest), and Volcán Fuego (3,763m, actively erupting — visible lava flows at night, visible ash plume most mornings). The city was destroyed by the 1773 Santa Marta earthqua…
Antigua was founded on March 10, 1543 as Santiago de los Caballeros — the third settlement to bear this name, after the first capital was destroyed by a mudflow (1541, from Volcán de Agua, killing the Spanish governor's wife and 600 others) and the second by earthquake. The city served as the capital of the Captaincy-General of Guatemala (covering modern Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and the Mexican state of Chiapas) for 230 years — the most important administrative center of the Spanish Americas between Mexico City and Lima. Hernán Cortés's lieutenant Pedro de Alva…