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Southeast from Chiquimula a beautiful road heads through the hills, running beneath craggy outcrops and forested peaks before emerging suddenly at the lip of a huge, bowl-shaped valley, with the town of ESQUIPULAS below. The final town on the eastern highway, Esquipulas is the most important Catholic shrine in Central America, and is entirely dominated by the four perfectly white domes of its church , which are brilliantly floodlit at night. The rest of the town is a messy sprawl of cheap hotels, souvenir stalls and restaurants which have sprung up to serve the pilgrims who flock to the town year-round from all over Central America, creating a booming resort where people come to worship, eat, drink and relax, in a bizarre combination of holy devotion and indulgence. The principal day of pilgrimage is January 15, when even the smallest villages save enough money to send a representative or two, filling the town to bursting point. Esquipulas's other claim to fame is as the place where the first peace accord initiatives to end the civil wars in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala were signed in 1987. As a religious shrine, Esquipulas probably predates the Conquest. When the Spanish arrived, the Maya chief surrendered rather than risk bloodshed; the grateful Spaniards named the town in his honour and commissioned the famed colonial sculptor Quirio Catano to carve an image of Christ for the church. Perhaps in order to make it more appealing to the local Maya, he chose to carve it from balsam, a dark wood. Things really took off in 1737 when the bishop of Guatemala, Pardo de Figueroa, was cured of a chronic ailment on a trip to Esquipulas. The bishop ordered the construction of a new church, which was completed in 1758, and his body was buried beneath the altar. Inside the church today there's a constant scurry of hushed devotion amid clouds of smoke and incense. In the nave, pilgrims approach the image on their knees, while others light candles, mouth supplications or simply stand in silent groups. The image itself is approached by a side entrance: join the queue to shuffle past beneath it and pause briefly in front before being shoved on by the crowds behind. Back outside you'll find yourself among swarms of souvenir and relic hawkers, and pilgrims who, duty done, are ready to head off to eat and drink away the rest of their stay
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