Description
A view over the top of a cloud forest lookout to the Izalco volcano poking through the coastal cloud layers near the Pacific Coast of northwestern El Salvador in Central America--not far from the Guatemala border--as seen from the top of another volcano nearby (Santa Ana) in the Cerro Verde National Park. Izalco was very active until about 2001 and had been known for about three centuries as "the Lighthouse of the Pacific" because its very regular and fiery eruptions could be see easily at sea by ships. The adjacent volcano--Santa Ana--is now more active and recently threw out (in 2006) a fiery, steaming eruption of hot gases, water, and viscous/fluid lava flows that burned some of the cloud forest and forced people to flee from small villages down slope near the large Caldera Lake of Coatepeque.