Santa Ana - City of El Salvador
Santa Ana is the second largest city in El Salvador. Santa Ana has approximately 274,830 inhabitants and serves both as the capital of the department of Santa Ana and as the municipal seat for the surrounding municipality of the same name.
A major processing center for El Salvador's sizable coffee industry is located near Santa Ana.
The city of Santa Ana has pre-Columbian origins, whose founders were the Pocomame tribes, later the pipiles entered and conquered the zone in 1200 AD. The indigenous name of the region in Nahuat is Sihuatehuacán, that means "place of priestesses". There are some archeological traces of Sihuatehuacán in the present day district of Santa Barbara west of the Apanteos and Apanchacal rivers.
At the time of the golden era of coffee in El Salvador, Santa Ana was the most prosperous city in the country. Many industrialists who cultivated it lived in Santa Ana, and coffee haciendas sprouted all around the city generating a surplus of income when coffee prices sky-rocketed in the latter part of the 19th century. This led to the construction of architectural jewels such as the gothic Cathedral of Santa Ana and the Teatro de Santa Ana.
Notable Salvadoran personalities born in Santa Ana are the writer David Escobar Galindo, the poet Jose Valdez and ex- presidents Tomás Regalado and Pedro Jose Escalón, together with several members of the influential Pacas family.
The city of Santa Ana has 183 schools according to statistics from the Salvadoran Ministry of Education, out of those 53 are private.
Some of the best known schools are:
Colegio Bautista
Liceo San Luis
Escuela Interamericana
Colegio Latinoamericano
Colegio Salesiano San José
Colegio Santa María
CE INSA
Santa Ana has a few universities, some of the major ones are: Universidad Católica de Occiente, Universidad de El Salvador Facultad Multidiciplinaria de Occidente and Universidad Autónoma de Santa Ana
Like the rest of the country, Christianity is the principal faith with the majority of the population of Santa Ana professing Roman Catholicism, but there is a fast growing Protestant Evangelical population mainly congregating in churches such as Mission Cristiana ELIM.
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