How to Hike the Santa Ana Volcano (El Salvador)

Last Updated on May 20, 2023 by Adam Watts

This is a guide on how to hike the Santa Ana volcano in El Salvador: step one: while facing the volcano, put one foot in front of the other until you reach the top. Step two: congratulate yourself on a job well done!

For people looking for practical information on how to hike the Santa Ana volcano, sorry to make you endure that opening sentence. Here’s your info:

1. Get to La Vencedora bus station before 7.30am.
2. Buy a ticket to Parque Nacional Cerro Verde, leaving at 7:40am (I’m not sure if this is every day). Price: $0.90.
3. Take the bus and get off at the park (takes around 90 minutes).
4. At 11am a guide and some police will escort you up the volcano.
5. Put one foot in front of the other until you reach the top (2 hours).
6. Put one foot in front of the other until you reach the bottom (90 minutes).
7. Take the bus back.

Now that the practicalities are over, here’s how to hike the Santa Ana volcano with some fun stuff added in:

How to get to the Santa Ana volcano

I was with an Irish guy, two Germans, and an Italian, and none of us spoke much Spanish. None of us spoke much at all, come to think of it, not until we reached the top of the volcano. The five of us met in the open courtyard of Casa Verde hostel (at which I highly recommend staying!) at 7:10. Alex, the Irish guy, and Gio, the Italian guy, knocked back a cup of coffee. I ate a banana and downed half a bottle of water. The Germans stood by like nourishment was a fool’s game.

At 7:20 we headed out to La Vencedora bus station. So far about a dozen words have been spoken, all practical: “Where is the station?” “What time is the bus?” Not everyone in our group knows each other, but “hey”, “mate”, and random grunting sounds will suffice for now.

The tickets cost $0.90 each. We wait in silence for ten minutes, then board the bus, empty since it departs from this station. Each small bench fits two people but each of us takes our own; our relationships with each other haven’t yet graduated to making small talk on public transport.

The journey is uneventful and takes around ninety minutes. Besides the town of Congo, most of what we see is just trees. So many trees. Trees covering every inch of the hills we drive up and around on the way to Cerro Verde national park.

Waiting to hike…

After the bus drops us off, we pay a few bucks to enter the national park, and then we walk up to a clearing around which are a few tarpaulins, a public bathroom, a group of men working on something indeterminate in the shade, and a small outdoor café that looks like it’s just about to open.

Some teenagers are thwacking a football around outside a small ticket booth. One of the Germans – the one of us with the best Spanish – asks how to hike to the top of the volcano. He reports back that we have to wait for the guide and policemen, who will come around 11am. It’s currently 9.30. Gio the Italian orders some breakfast from the now-open café; once his food arrives the rest of us take it in turns to order the same thing. A fried egg, rice, beans, and a block of cheese, served on a plastic plate. We eat, sitting at least a space apart on both sides of a long bench.

Hiking the Santa Ana volcano

Sometime between 11 and half past, the guide and two policemen with machetes and guns show up. The five of us, plus what looks like a group of high schoolers, and a dozen others congregate at the entrance. The guide talks in Spanish for a solid five minutes with a serious face. After he finishes, I ask Alex if he caught any of that. “Not a word, lad.” Gio seems to know but he just shrugs and says it’s not important. Alrighty then. Safety guidance be damned.

The hike up to Santa Ana volcano starts by taking us back down to where the bus had dropped us off, via a muddy forest trail. And not to complain about exercise or the experience or anything, but that first part of the hike, back to the main road, took us thirty minutes. Thirty minutes of mud to get to where the bus had originally dropped us off two hours ago. Poor Alex already seems to be struggling.

Anyway, rant over. We then start heading up, first back into the woods, then out of the woods and onto a path made of rocks, marked by yellow paint. On either side is cacti and other prickly shrubbery.

Alex drops back to the end of the group. I can’t keep up with Gio and the Germans but even they can’t match the high schoolers who are practically jogging over the treacherous rocks. One false step and bye, bye ankle, but like teenagers everywhere, they’re basically invincible. In related news, I’m turning 30 in 3 months. God I miss being young.

I make it to the top after just under two hours. The high schoolers seem like they’ve been here for hours, now lounging around eating ice cream looking bored. Two of them even brought their football and are kicking it around without a care for the steaming geyser just a slipped foot away. Lord of the Rings would’ve been much shorter if they’d sent a teenager instead of Frodo.

Since making it this far through my tale, which must have been just as agonizing as the hike was for me, here are some photos for you to enjoy:

For those wondering about Alex, he did indeed make it. Took him a while and he was more sweat than human when he collapsed at the top, but make it he did. Then two minutes later we all started heading back down. Poor Alex.

Getting back to Santa Ana

This post is getting pretty long and since our journey getting back to Santa Ana was quite an, err, experience, I wrote about that separately. See you over there. Until then, I hope you enjoyed this guide on how to hike the Santa Ana volcano.