Masaya Volcano has been acting up, and the park had been closed up until a few days before I got there on my recent trip to Nicaragua. The rangers were allowing only short, supervised visits to the top if conditions were good, which they were when I started filming. However, a few minutes into making my video the volcano belched out a bunch of heavy, yellow sulfuric gas and I had no clue. I was big time under the gun to get my whole video finished in less than ten minutes (that’s all the longer we were allowed to stay). Finally a ranger got my attention and told me I needed to leave, and as soon as I saw what was going on behind me I quickly obliged. Right when I got in the car the smoke rolled out of the crater and over the parking area. I was there with my wife and two friends, and we couldn’t see anything – literally no visibility whatsoever. So we put the air on recirculate and drove by feel as quickly as we could.
I think this video is interesting on two levels. First, the story about the history of the volcano cult and the Roman Catholic church that I went there to tell in the first place is super fascinating and raises good questions. Second, I kept the camera running enough that you’ll be able to get a sense of what happened while I was filming and fleeing.
SOURCES:
If you’re someone who likes to wade through historical sources, here’s a bunch on the history of Masaya Volcano, including the primary sources recording the correspondence between eye-witnesses and Carlos V who was Holy Roman Emperor in the 16th century. José G. Viramonte and Jaime Incer-Barquero assembled an excellent bibliography for their article which was published in the Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research in 2008. The full text of their article is available here: http://www.geo.mtu.edu/~raman/papers2/ViramonteMasayaJVGR08.pdf. The bibliography was too long to fit in the YouTube description but is available on page 8 of the linked article above.
Additionally, a Spanish explorer named Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdész visited and chronicled Masaya volcano starting in 1529. His account in it’s original printing is available here: http://bdh-rd.bne.es/viewer.vm?pid=d-175550.
The complete edition (drawing on Oviedo y Valdesz’s extensive notes) was published posthumously in the mid 19th century and is much more accessible to modern students of Spanish. It’s available here: https://archive.org/details/generalynatural01fernrich.
Primary sources on the Spanish conquest of Central America are limited, but this article does a good job of detailing what’s available including the challenges associated with each source. Nearly every significant character in the early colonial history of Masaya is referenced here: https://www.historians.org/teaching-and-learning/classroom-content/teaching-and-learning-in-the-digital-age/the-conquest-of-mexico/for-teachers/general-discussion-of-the-primary-sources-used-in-this-project
Viramonte y Incer-Barquero Bibliography available on page 8 of the linked article: http://www.geo.mtu.edu/~raman/papers2/ViramonteMasayaJVGR08.pdf
