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Honduras's second city, and the country's driving economic force, SAN PEDRO SULA sprawls across the fertile Valle de Sula at the foot of the Merendon mountain chain, just an hour from the coast. Flat and uninspiring to look at, and for most of the year uncomfortably hot and humid, this is a city for getting business done in rather than sightseeing. It's also the transport hub for northern and western Honduras, meaning that a visit here is usually unavoidable, even if only to pass through. On a more positive note, in terms of facilities San Pedro rates alongside Tegucigalpa, with its own international airport, foreign consulates, and a wide range of hotels, restaurants and shopping outlets - travellers coming from the north rarely need to visit the capital. If you do choose to stick around for a day or two, it's not difficult to organize a trip out to one of the country's finest cloudforest reserves , the Parque Nacional El Cusuco. One of the first Spanish settlements in the country, founded by Pedro de Alvarado in 1536, today's San Pedro bears almost no trace of its pre-twentieth-century incarnation. Burnt out by French corsairs in 1660 and virtually abandoned during a yellow-fever epidemic in 1892, the city struggled to maintain a population of more than five thousand, and today only a few wooden buildings remain as proof of its long past. Fortunes began to rise with the growth of the banana industry in the late nineteenth century, when the city rapidly cemented its role as Honduras's commercial centre. With its outer reaches continuing to sprout factories, many of them foreign-owned, and a population now in the region of 600,000, San Pedro ranks as one of the fastest-growing cities in Central America.
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