The reading list
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The state of exception, and what it means for you
Read these before anything else. The emergency rules apply to visitors as well as residents, and the advisories are specific about what that means at a checkpoint.
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El Salvador: safety and security
Says plainly that police may ask for ID and may detain you if they suspect gang membership, that hearings for over 100 people at once are common, and that the government may not let the British Embassy give consular assistance to someone arrested. Carry a copy of your passport photo page.
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Travel advice and advisories for El Salvador
"Exercise a high degree of caution", last updated July 2026. The most practical of the advisories: carry valid ID, expect checkpoints, tattoos may be read as gang affiliation, and people have been arrested over social media posts.
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World Report 2026: El Salvador
The annual chapter. By the time of writing the emergency had been extended 45 times, more than 90,000 people had been arrested, over 3,000 of them children, and at least 458 detainees had died in prison.
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The human cost of the state of exception could amount to crimes against humanity
Published July 2026 after six fact-finding visits and 109 interviews. Counts over 90,000 detentions and at least 470 deaths in state custody, and finds that arrests fell hardest on poor, stigmatised neighbourhoods, often on appearance or anonymous tip-offs.
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Four years of ongoing human rights violations in El Salvador
A short statement from the Washington Office on Latin America at the four-year mark, March 2026. Useful for what has happened around the emergency: the main humanitarian organisation, Cristosal, has left the country, and reforms now allow indefinite re-election.
How the murder drop is counted
The fall is real. The official number is still a definition, and the definition was narrowed in 2019.
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InSight Crime's 2025 homicide round-up
Records the official 82 murders in 2025, a rate of 1.3 per 100,000, and explains what that excludes: bodies found in unmarked graves, killings by police and murders in prisons. El Salvador does not follow the regional Bogotá Protocol, so the figure cannot be compared directly with its neighbours'.
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El Salvador to omit key data from official homicide tally
The July 2019 decision itself: victims of alleged clashes with security forces and bodies found buried in graves would no longer be counted as homicides. Read this to understand why every later figure needs a footnote.
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A closer look at El Salvador's homicide stats
From 2012, under a different president, when the forensic institute and the security ministry already disagreed about the daily murder count. A reminder that arguing over these numbers is older than the current government.
Dollars, and what became of Bitcoin
The currency is the US dollar. Bitcoin became legal tender in 2021, and a January 2025 reform made accepting it voluntary. Plenty of pages have not caught up.
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Decreto No. 199: Reformas a la Ley Bitcoin
The two-page reform, in Spanish, published on 30 January 2025 and in force 90 days later. The law still calls Bitcoin curso legal, legal tender, while making acceptance voluntary and limiting it to private individuals and wholly private companies. The primary text, in place of the many summaries.
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El Salvador: request for an extended arrangement under the Extended Fund Facility
Why the law changed. The 2025 loan programme made the reform a prior action, and the IMF describes it as removing the concept of currency and the essential features of legal tender from the law, with taxes payable only in US dollars.
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Moneda
The central bank quotes the 2000 Monetary Integration Law that gives the dollar unrestricted legal tender status, and sets the rule for torn notes: banks swap them at full value only if more than half the note survives in one piece.
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Money and fraud: the Chivo wallet
Confirms the US dollar as the official currency and warns of identity theft and failed transactions with Chivo, the government-launched Bitcoin wallet. If you do try Bitcoin, watch your statements.
Surf City and the coast
Surf City is a government programme as much as a place: roads, boardwalks and branding along the La Libertad coast since 2019. Who it has displaced is part of the picture.
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Pronóstico de playas: Surf City
The environment ministry's wave and wind forecast for El Tunco, El Zonte, Mizata, Los Cóbanos, Costa del Sol and El Cuco, with live sea-level readings. The Canadian advisory warns that riptides and undertows are common, so check it.
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El Salvador's Surf City reshapes coastline amid tourism boom
A December 2025 account of what the programme has built, who paid (development bank loans for roads and sanitation), and the rise in property prices around El Tunco. The arrival figures it quotes are the government's.
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Evictions and unemployment in Surf City: 25 families in El Zonte
Bilingual write-up of a MalaYerba investigation from 2023: families who had lived on the beach at El Zonte for over 30 years, moved off the site of a state Bitcoin beach club and offered houses inland near a sewage plant.
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El Zonte
The surf village known as Bitcoin Beach, where an anonymous donor's bitcoin to local nonprofits started the experiment that the president later cited for the national law.
Volcanoes, the Ruta de las Flores and Joya de Cerén
The interior is a chain of volcanoes, coffee towns and one World Heritage site. The volcanoes are active, which is the reason to check the monitoring before you climb.
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Parque Arqueológico Joya de Cerén
The ministry that runs the site. A Late Classic village buried by the Loma Caldera eruption around AD 650, inscribed by UNESCO in 1993 and still the country's only World Heritage site. Open Tuesday to Sunday, 9am to 4pm; $10 for non-resident foreigners when checked in 2026.
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Joya de Cerén
Found by a bulldozer driver in 1976. Explains why so much survived, ash that fell fast and cool, and why what you see is households, kitchens, storehouses, a sauna and a manioc field: ordinary village life, which is rare.
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Vulcanología
The national observatory's volcano pages, in Spanish: active volcanoes, daily and monthly monitoring reports and eruptive history. Check it before a crater hike.
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Santa Ana Volcano
Ilamatepec, 2,381 metres and the country's highest volcano, with a crater lake at the top. Its last eruption, in 2005, killed at least two people. The Canadian advisory says never to hike volcanoes alone and to hire an experienced guide.
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Ruta de las Flores
The six towns on the route from Nahuizalco to Ahuachapán, the coffee country around Apaneca, Juayúa's weekend food festival, and how to get there by bus from San Salvador. Written by travellers, and nobody is selling the tour.
Background, and who can still report
Independent reporting on El Salvador increasingly comes from outside it.
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Freedom in the World 2026: El Salvador
Partly Free, 42 out of 100. The overview of how power has been concentrated, from the second term won despite a constitutional bar to the abolition of term limits.
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El Salvador
143rd of 180 in the 2026 press freedom index, down from 135th. Records whole newsrooms relocating abroad, which tells you why the domestic coverage you find may be thin.
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El Faro English
Salvadoran investigative journalism in English, including a podcast. Read it for the stories the official channels do not carry.
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Salvadoran gang crackdown
The timeline from the 87 murders of 25 to 27 March 2022 that triggered the emergency to the 40,000-capacity mega-prison opened in 2023, with citations to follow.
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El Salvador
Geography, the 1980 to 1992 civil war, the switch from the colón to the dollar in 2001, and the rest of the history the current story sits on.