To Nica - on our 15th anniversary

After fifteen years:

Each time the plane dips below the clouds and the first curve of your volcanoes rises through the haze, my heart does the same thing it did the first time I saw you — it stops, and then it soars. I’ve been coming to you for years now, and still, every arrival feels like a homecoming.

When destinations have learned to disguise themselves — where authenticity is repackaged, downgraded and sold by the night — you remain gloriously, stubbornly yourself. You are not curated. You are not choreographed.

Pablo Neruda told us: “I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.” That’s how this feels — this devotion that has no itinerary, no reason, no single season. You seduce not with perfection, but with presence. With the scent of wood smoke in the evening. With the church bells that call out over León at dusk. With the fishermen pulling in their nets under a sky the color of rust and fire.

I’ve watched the world around you change — surf camps becoming boutique hotels, jungle trails turning into paved roads. You resist translation. The light still falls golden through the palms of Ometepe. The wind still stirs the Lake like a whisper. Granada still glows like a dream painted in colonial colors and candlelight.

When I’m with you, I remember that travel can still be discovery — not of new places, but of the old parts of ourselves we forgot we had. You return me to dust, to salt, to laughter shared with strangers on a bus, to a kind of honesty that modern life has almost forgotten.

Rubén Darío — your own poet, your own voice — wrote, “Youth, divine treasure, you go and will not return.” And yet, when I am here, I feel that youth again: the wild, unguarded wonder of simply being alive in a world that hums with beauty and chaos and grace.

So I keep coming back — to your volcanoes, to your villages, to your people who smile without pretense and welcome without condition. I come back to remember what matters, to feel the pulse of something old beneath the surface of something new.

Nicaragua, you are not just a place on a map. You are a heartbeat, a promise, a poem that refuses to end.