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The colonial houses are mostly single-story, with courtyards, tile roofs, massive adobe walls, and very high ceilings. These features combine to make air conditioning unnecessary. They’re really nice houses. In small towns, people leave their front doors open; in bigger towns, they have the grillwork closed and the door open. It’s a pleasure to walk down the street in the evening and pass the domestic scenes revealed in each lighted parlor.

You can build such a house from not much more than dirt, grass, and sticks. Many houses have quite a lot of wooden structure embedded in the adobe. This probably enables them to withstand earthquakes better. That’s important in a country with such active geology.

Houses often have a lot of fibrous material, like straw, mixed in the bricks. I saw no signs of decay in the fibers or wooden beams buried in the walls.

This church in Leon (above, right) was destroyed during the fighting to take a prison across the street. They left it this way as a monument, and built a brand new church right next to it. Also, the old prison (below, right) now contains a folklore museum full of stuffed figurines representing characters from folktales.