Santa Ana Cathedral, El Salvador

Santa Ana Cathedral, El Salvador tickets: which one to buy

Santa Ana is El Salvador's second city, about an hour from the capital by road, and the cathedral is the reason most visitors stop in the centre at all. Entry is free. The square in front, with the theatre on one side and the town hall on another, is the best concentration of early twentieth-century architecture in the country, all of it paid for by coffee, and a short guided walk explains that connection well.

Most organised trips use the city as a base rather than a destination, combining it with the volcano, the crater lake and the mountain villages of the flower route, and they stop here for an hour on the way through. If you are travelling independently, the buses from San Salvador are frequent and cheap and the centre is walkable. Ask locally about which streets to avoid after dark, as advice changes, and treat the square itself as the safe daytime core that it is.

Visiting Santa Ana Cathedral, El Salvador: what to see

The original parish church went up in the 1570s and was destroyed by lightning in the nineteenth century. When a diocese was created here, the decision was taken to rebuild on a quite different model: instead of the thick-walled colonial baroque used everywhere else in Central America, the new cathedral was designed as a neo-Gothic church, begun in 1906 and consecrated in 1913, with work continuing until the marble altar was finished in 1959.

The result is startling in its setting, a white pinnacled front with pointed arches and rose windows rising over a tropical square. Three naves form a cross, the central one wide and high. Each of the two towers carries three bells, those in the southern tower brought from the Netherlands in 1949 and rung electrically, while the northern set is still swung by hand. The building was declared a national monument in 1995. The theatre opposite, from the same coffee boom, completes the picture.

Santa Ana Cathedral, El Salvador opening hours and the best time to go

The dry season from November to April is the comfortable half of the year; the rains come in the afternoon from May to October and can be heavy. Santa Ana sits high enough to be cooler than the coast. Mornings are the time for the square, which fills with market traders and shoeshine stands, and the light on the white front is best then. The city festival at the end of July runs for a week with processions, fairs and closed streets, and is the liveliest time to be here.

Sunday mass fills the cathedral. Buses to the volcano national park leave very early and return in the early afternoon, so the cathedral fits better at the end of a day than the start. The theatre across the square offers tours when no rehearsal is running. Half an hour inside is enough, and the coffee in the cafes around the square is the local product and is worth ordering.