Lake Nicaragua
The largest lake in Central America, home to freshwater sharks
Lake Nicaragua — Cocibolca to the people who live around it — is the largest lake in Central America and one of the strangest, for it is a freshwater lake patrolled by sharks. Bull sharks swim up the San Juan River from the Caribbean and into its waters, alongside sawfish and tarpon, oceanic creatures thriving improbably in fresh water. From its surface rise the twin volcanoes of Ometepe Island, a near-perfect cone-and-crater pairing that has made the lake one of the iconic landscapes of the Americas.
The lake spreads across about 8,264 square kilometres yet is shallow, with a maximum depth of only around 26 metres, sitting just 32 metres above sea level. It drains east through the San Juan River to the Caribbean Sea, the very corridor the bull sharks use to come and go between ocean and lake. Volcanic in setting, it holds the volcanic islands of Ometepe and Zapatera and the cluster of tiny isletas near Granada, formed when a nearby volcano blew its top and scattered debris across the water.
That low elevation and Caribbean outlet made the lake a tantalising route for a trans-isthmus canal, debated for centuries and revived in modern proposals that have alarmed conservationists worried about the lake's ecology and its role as a vast freshwater reserve. The Spanish founded Granada on its shore in 1524, one of the oldest colonial cities in the Americas. Today the lake sustains fishing communities, draws travellers to Ometepe, and supplies fresh water to a country that calls it, fondly, the Sweet Sea.