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Honduras—The Knee of Central America

Quick Facts: The Geography of Honduras

Location: Middle America, bordering the Caribbean Sea between Guatemala and Nicaragua and bordering the North Pacific Ocean between El Salvador and Nicaragua. Geographic coordinates: 15’00” N, 86’30”W Area: (slightly larger than Tennessee)

Borders: Guatemala (256 km), El Salvador (342 km), Nicaragua (922 km). Terrain: mostly mountains in interior, narrow coastal plains. Elevation extremes: lowest point: Caribbean Sea 0 m highest point: Cerro Las Minas 2,870 m Natural resources: timber, gold, silver, copper, lead, zinc, iron ore, antimony, coal, fish, hydropower.

total: 112,090 sq. km land: 111,890 sq. km water: 200 sq. km

Source: CIA World Factbook 2015

important places are located here—Puerto Cortés, the country’s largest port, and San Pedro Sula, Honduras’s industrial and agricultural center. To the far east, near the Nicaraguan border, the Caribbean lowlands fan out into a humid, bug-infested area known as the Mosquitia, or the Mosquito Coast. Consisting of inland savanna with swamps and mangrove , the Mosquitia is Honduras’s least developed area. During times of heavy rainfall, the few people who live here get around by shallow-draft boats. Farming and fishing are the main occupations of the scattered population. Pacific Lowlands The Pacific lowlands, centered on the Gulf of Fonseca, are only a small part of Honduras and contain an equally small part of the population. The land is flat, changing to swamps near the shores of the gulf. But the soil there is