I left. Then I came home to a different country.

I grew up in Santa Tecla, and then I had to leave. That sentence covers about two million of us, and for a long time it was the only thing anyone abroad wanted to hear about El Salvador — the leaving, and the reasons for it.

Leaving was the right decision at the time. My family knew it, they made it possible, and I have stopped arguing with them about whether it was a loss. What nobody prepared me for was coming back: to a country I had to learn again from the beginning, where the bus routes had changed, the neighbourhoods I was warned about had not been dangerous for years, and the thing I kept feeling — walking the malecón at ten at night, which I could not have done as a girl — was that it had become beautiful.

You can love a place you had to leave. You are allowed to be glad you went, and glad you came back, and those two things do not cancel out.

AH El Salvador started as a notebook of things I could not find written down anywhere: which bus goes to Cerro Verde, what the residency file actually requires, whether the coast is safe at night, what a month costs. Then people started writing to ask, and it became this.

What is here

34 guides, 9 destination pages and 10 data series, all dated. If a page has not been checked this year, it says so at the top. If a restaurant closes, the recommendation goes with it.

How we check things

• Hotels listed here are places we have slept in.
• Restaurants listed here are places we have eaten twice.
• Prices are surveyed quarterly, not copied from other sites.
• Legal and immigration pages are read by a Salvadoran lawyer before publishing, and they are still journalism rather than advice.

How this is paid for

Affiliate links, a paid directory, a small number of labelled sponsored posts, photo licensing, and web work for local businesses. None of it buys a recommendation, and all of it is set out plainly on the disclosure page.

The part that is uncomfortable

El Salvador's transformation is real and it was achieved by means that serious human-rights organisations object to. We report both, on the same page, without pretending the tension resolves. See is El Salvador safe and the homicide data.