Fast Facts
- Named for: “Depths,” possibly of the Bay of Trujillo
- Long/Lat: 14.6 N/87.13 W, 2700 miles and 5 hours east of Castro Valley
- Population: 9.6 million, 145x CV
- Size: 43,400 sq mi, 2500x CV
- Avg temp in April: 90 F/32 C (phew)
- Median household income: $7,000 annual
- Ethnicity: 83% Mestizo, 7% white, 7% indigenous
- Main industries: Bananas, shrimp, agriculture
Honduras either literally means “depths” (the noun) and/or it was originally fondura in a Spanish dialect, and someone mis-quilled the first letter, reporting back to Ferdinand and Isabel. In either case, it was described by Columbus, in theory, because the anchorage in the Bay of Trujillo was deep. There he goes again, naming islands for days of the week or their maritime statistics. As a famous alien once said, humans are so unimaginative, they named their planet after the dirt.
Honduras is the horizontal “shelf” that juts out underneath the Yucatan, that curved part of Mexico that partly surrounds the Gulf of Mexico, in which the asteroid landed to kill the–but enough about dinosaurs (can’t get enough about dinosaurs!). Anyway, the Mayans were all over the Yucatan centuries ago as well as Honduras. A major site at Copán, south of the Yucatan, was occupied for over 2000 years, eventually becoming a local Mayan capital that housed 20,000 people (Castro Valley-sized!) Ancient Copán includes temples, pyramids, and even a ballcourt for the famous ballgame, pok-a-pok.
A second claim to fame for Honduras is less prestigious. Because of its abundance of agriculture, Honduras became prey–there’s no better word for it–to American fruit corporations. The U.S. moved troops and ships throughout the area at the end of the 19th century, as well as in the South Pacific, largely to secure land for the fruit companies in what scholars even call the “banana wars.”
O’Henry spent months down in Honduras and wrote a book of short stories involving a fictitious place, Anchuria, which he referred to as a “banana republic.” O’Henry meant a place taken over by fruit business interests, although the meaning has become twisted to also suggest a politically unstable government. (Instability caused by corruption from said business interests).
Less sinister but equally curious is another Honduras occurrence: lluvia de peces or rain of the fishes. On multiple occasions, not only in Honduras but also in India and Australia, a rainstorm has left dead fish scattered across the countryside. Even in the past decade, observers have seen roads littered with fish. When this occurred in the nineteenth century, a priest explained it as a miracle.
The more recent explanation involves waterspouts. These are mini-cyclones that occur during a strong storm, over the ocean. In theory, they suck up fish–or tadpoles, turtles, or frogs (see Exodus)–and deposit them somewhere else, much the same way that a cow, Auntie Em, and Dorothy get sucked up by a Kansas tornado.
So is there a lluvia de vacas? That would really be mooving!