Gracias, Honduras
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Gracias, Honduras
Gracias () is a small Honduran town/municipality that was founded in 1536, and is the capital of Lempira Department. The municipality has a population of 57,182 and the town a population of 16,680 (2020 calculation). It is located in the mountainous center of western Honduras. Etymology The word ''gracias'' means "thanks" in Spanish. It is said that upon arriving at the site of the city of Gracias, the Spanish explorers, tired after having trekked through the mountainous terrain, said "''Gracias a Dios hemos llegado a tierra plana''," meaning "Thank God we have arrived at flat land." History Foundation The city was founded in October 1536 under the name of "Gracias a Dios" by Gonzalo de Alvarado y Chávez, Pedro de Alvarado's first cousin, in a place called Opoa, near the banks of the Higuito River. During The viceregal era, Gracias was very important for the Spanish and had some years of growth, before being eclipsed by the cities of Antigua Guatemala and Comayagua. On ...
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Köppen Climate Classification
The Köppen climate classification is one of the most widely used climate classification systems. It was first published by German-Russian climatologist Wladimir Köppen (1846–1940) in 1884, with several later modifications by Köppen, notably in 1918 and 1936. Later, the climatologist Rudolf Geiger (1894–1981) introduced some changes to the classification system, which is thus sometimes called the Köppen–Geiger climate classification system. The Köppen climate classification divides climates into five main climate groups, with each group being divided based on seasonal precipitation and temperature patterns. The five main groups are ''A'' (tropical), ''B'' (arid), ''C'' (temperate), ''D'' (continental), and ''E'' (polar). Each group and subgroup is represented by a letter. All climates are assigned a main group (the first letter). All climates except for those in the ''E'' group are assigned a seasonal precipitation subgroup (the second letter). For example, ''Af'' indi ...
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San Cristóbal Fortress (Honduras)
The San Cristóbal fortress is located in the city of Gracias, department of Lempira, built on a small hill above the city, which was formerly the center of the town of Gracias Lempira, which was once the capital of New Spain and headquarters of the ''Real Audiencia de los Confines'' in 1544; Gracias was a strategic city within the Province of Honduras in the colonial era, then in the pro-independence era and then in the Central American federal transition. History Background The first building of Spanish origin was built in the seventeenth century, on the hill "San Cristóbal", and of which two cannons with the emblem of Carlos IV of Spain are preserved. In 1850 the fort was rebuilt by order of Juan Lindo, fearing an invasion from Guatemala. But it was not until 1863 that the works of the present fort began, which was concluded between 1875 and 1876, in the administration of Captain General José María Medina. Its purpose was to defend the city from its strategic point o ...
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Hot Springs
A hot spring, hydrothermal spring, or geothermal spring is a spring produced by the emergence of geothermally heated groundwater onto the surface of the Earth. The groundwater is heated either by shallow bodies of magma (molten rock) or by circulation through faults to hot rock deep in the Earth's crust. In either case, the ultimate source of the heat is radioactive decay of naturally occurring radioactive elements in the Earth's mantle, the layer beneath the crust. Hot spring water often contains large amounts of dissolved minerals. The chemistry of hot springs ranges from acid sulfate springs with a pH as low as 0.8, to alkaline chloride springs saturated with silica, to bicarbonate springs saturated with carbon dioxide and carbonate minerals. Some springs also contain abundant dissolved iron. The minerals brought to the surface in hot springs often feed communities of extremophiles, microorganisms adapted to extreme conditions, and it is possible that life on Earth had its ...
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Celaque Mountain National Park
Celaque National Park (formally in Spanish, ''Parque Nacional Montaña de Celaque'') is a national park in Lempira Ocotepeque and Copán, western Honduras. It was established on 5 August 1987 and covers an area of 266.31 square kilometres. It includes Honduras’ tallest peak, called Cerro Las Minas or Pico Celaque, which reaches approximately above mean sea level. It has an elevation ranging from . Celaque’s terrain is very rugged, two-thirds of the area has a slope greater than 60 degrees. The park is classified as a cloud forest with a mean precipitation of 1,600 mm at lower altitudes and a mean of 2,400 mm at higher altitudes. The word ''celaque'' is reputed to mean ''caja de aguas'' ("box of water(s)") in the local, but now extinct, indigenous Lenca language. Celaque’s nine rivers supplies water to 120 villages nearby including the district capital of Gracias. Celaque is high in biodiversity and is home to pumas, ocelots and Bolitoglossa celaque, an endan ...
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Cloud Forest
A cloud forest, also called a water forest, primas forest, or tropical montane cloud forest (TMCF), is a generally tropical or subtropical, evergreen, montane, moist forest characterized by a persistent, frequent or seasonal low-level cloud cover, usually at the canopy level, formally described in the ''International Cloud Atlas'' (2017) as silvagenitus. Cloud forests often exhibit an abundance of mosses covering the ground and vegetation, in which case they are also referred to as mossy forests. Mossy forests usually develop on the saddles of mountains, where moisture introduced by settling clouds is more effectively retained. Cloud forests are among the most biodiversity rich ecosystems in the world with a large amount of species directly or indirectly depending on them. Other moss forests include black spruce/feathermoss climax forest, with a moderately dense canopy and a forest floor of feathermosses including ''Hylocomium splendens'', ''Pleurozium schreberi'' and ''Ptil ...
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Montaña Celaque
Cerro Las Minas is the highest mountain in Honduras. Cerro Las Minas is located in the rugged and relatively isolated Lempira Department Lempira is one of the 18 departments in Honduras. located in the western part of the country, it is bordered by the departments of Ocotepeque and Copán to the west, Intibucá to the east, and Santa Bárbara to the north. To its south lies th ... in the western part of the country. A Honduran national park, the Celaque National Park, was established in 1987 for the mountain and some of surrounding territory. It is part of the Cordillera de Celaque mountain range and is given the name "Pico Celaque, 2849m" on local 1:50,000 topographic mapping, but SRTM data suggests that 2870 m is more accurate. References External links Las Minas Highest points of countries {{Honduras-geo-stub ...
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Afro-Hondurans
Afro-Hondurans or Black Hondurans are Hondurans of Sub-Saharan African descent. The CIA world factbook regards their population to be around 2% of the country's population, while other sources estimate the percentage of Afro-Hondurans as being 10%; the latter number including Garifunas. Estimates vary with concervative estimates ranging as low as 1% and higher estimates ranging to 30%. They descended from: enslaved Africans by the Spanish, as well as those who were enslaved from the West Indies and identify as Creole peoples, and the Garifuna who descend from exiled zambo Maroons from Saint Vincent. The Creole people were originally from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands, while the Garifuna people were originally from Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. Garifunas arrived in the late seventeen hundreds and the Creole peoples arrived during the eighteen hundreds. About 600,000 Hondurans are from Garífuna descent that are a mix of African and indigenous as of Afro Latin Americans. ...
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White Latin Americans
White Latin Americans, or European Latin Americans, are Latin Americans who are considered white, typically due to European descent. Latin American countries have often tolerated intermarriage between different ethnic groups since the beginning of the colonial period. Direct descendants of European settlers who arrived in the Americas during the colonial and post-colonial periods can be found throughout Latin America. Most immigrants who settled the region for the past five centuries were Spanish and Portuguese; after independence, the most numerous non- Iberian immigrants were French, Italians, and Germans, followed by other Europeans as well as West Asians (such as Levantine Arabs and Armenians). Composing from 33% of the population , according to some sources,CIA data from The World Factbook'Field Listing :: Ethnic groupsan retrieved on May 09 2011. They show 191,543,213 whites from a total population of 579,092,570. For a few countries the percentage of white population is ...
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Indigenous Peoples Of The Americas
The Indigenous peoples of the Americas are the inhabitants of the Americas before the arrival of the European settlers in the 15th century, and the ethnic groups who now identify themselves with those peoples. Many Indigenous peoples of the Americas were traditionally hunter-gatherers and many, especially in the Amazon basin, still are, but many groups practiced aquaculture and agriculture. While some societies depended heavily on agriculture, others practiced a mix of farming, hunting, and gathering. In some regions, the Indigenous peoples created monumental architecture, large-scale organized cities, city-states, chiefdoms, states, kingdoms, republics, confederacies, and empires. Some had varying degrees of knowledge of engineering, architecture, mathematics, astronomy, writing, physics, medicine, planting and irrigation, geology, mining, metallurgy, sculpture, and gold smithing. Many parts of the Americas are still populated by Indigenous peoples; some countries have ...
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Mestizo
(; ; fem. ) is a term used for racial classification to refer to a person of mixed Ethnic groups in Europe, European and Indigenous peoples of the Americas, Indigenous American ancestry. In certain regions such as Latin America, it may also refer to people who are culturally European even though their ancestors are not. The term was used as an ethnic/racial category for mixed-race that evolved during the Spanish Empire. Although, broadly speaking, means someone of mixed European/Indigenous heritage, the term did not have a fixed meaning in the colonial period. It was a formal label for individuals in official documents, such as censuses, parish registers, Inquisition trials, and others. Priests and royal officials might have classified persons as mestizos, but individuals also used the term in self-identification. The noun , derived from the adjective , is a term for racial mixing that did not come into usage until the twentieth century; it was not a colonial-era term.Rappap ...
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