Ruins of León Viejo

Time stopped early at León Viejo. Among the first towns the Spanish founded in the Americas, it was abandoned in the early 17th century in the shadow of Momotombo volcano and never grew again — leaving a 16th-century ground plan fossilised beneath Nicaraguan soil, a rare unaltered witness to the Spanish Empire's social and economic order. UNESCO inscribed the ruins in 2000, and their archaeological potential remains immense.