Islands for Sale

Yesterday, Elena and I took a half-hour bus ride to Granada with my friend Anibal. I´d already been to Granada, Nicaragua´s original colonial capital (a big tourist destination, full of grand old churches and foreigners´houses), but had never seen the "Isletas de Granada," an archipelago of 380 tiny volcanic islands that extend like an arm from Granada into Lake Cocibolca. And so, we were headed for the islands.

We walked the wrong way from the bus stop for a few blocks, rounding a corner to find ourselves a few steps away from a corral containing three six-foot-tall, dusty-feathered ostriches. "In Granada?" I thought, "How did they get here?" I pictured the great hulks of their bodies balanced on bony legs in some freight car on a barge from Africa, or bouncing down the pan-American highway through cactus-sprinkled Mexican mountains. We had to stop and stare, and they stared back. Anibal pointed upwards, away from the birds-- the explanation: a circus truck.


Eventually we found our way to the central park, a shaded plaza surrounded by colonial grandeur. The main Cathedral, banana-yellow, and several posh hotels look down on the park´s colorful patchwork of vendors and plants. We headed down the hill on a cobblestone street, passing restaurants whose names, like "Cafe Chocolat" or"The Roadhouse," called out from chic signs that would have looked at home in a yuppie neighborhood in Chicago or Miami. We should not have been surprised when a cabbie in this neighborhood proposed that we pay him $5 to take us to the dock (a trip that should cost only 2). Granada is the gem of Nicaragua´s tourism industry, after all.

We did find an affordable ride. At the beach, three teenage boys approach the car waving laminated brochures, and through the open window begin negotiating the price for a tour. We settle on twelve dollars with one curly-haired boy, and he hauls his canopied boat to the water´s edge for us to climb aboard. We occupy three of twelve seats-- we have the boat to ourselves as we push off into the choppy brown water.

The boy began his spiel: "Lake Cocibolca is big enough that the entire island of Puerto Rico could fit inside it. It is big enough to provide fresh water to most of Central America, but for some reason there´s only one city that purifies water from the lake."

"How many of the islands are privately owned?" I ask.

"Three hundred and seventy or so. The government owns three."

This seems shocking. I ask who sold them, and when.

"In the 1930´s, there were some people who owned a farm on the coast, and they claimed that the islands were part of their farm. They made it legal, and then started selling them off," he says.

The breeze off the lake smells sweet. We approach our first island.

"This one belongs to the owners of Flor de Cana rum..."

"And Victoria beer," Anibal chimes in, "like you remember from the bar last night?"

I nod, but my attention is on the island. The owners have built it up so that the edges of the island are a stone wall, as if at the edge of a swimming pool. Their house, a modern construction of wood and glass, sits amidst a multi-tiered garden of stones and tropical plants, and a turquoise-tiled swimming pool sits only feet away from the lake´s brown water. A private paradise.

We pass more islands with private houses, some of them more and some less luxurious than the Flor de Cana family´s place. The majority of the owners are foreigners, and I experience a strange micture of desire to have my own personal paradise and revulsion at this very typical piece of Latin American history, a seizure and sale of native land by foreigners. We pass an island about the size of a gas station whose population of monkeys never leaves, and then an island with a "for sale" sign. (see below) I groan, and offer our guide some trail mix.