Markets, Colour and Commerce at Dawn

A Nicaraguan market is best met at opening, before it becomes a crush. Get there at six and you catch the bones of the thing: vendors hauling crates, hosing down the concrete, building their displays fruit by fruit into careful pyramids that will be dismantled, piece by piece, over the course of the day. The light comes in low and sideways through the gaps in the roof, and the whole place smells of wet stone, coffee, and corn already frying somewhere out of sight.

Masaya is the one I kept coming back to. There are really two markets here: the tourist craft market in its handsome old stone walls, and the real one behind it, a sprawling warren where the town actually buys its food. The craft market is for hammocks and leather, colour hung floor to ceiling, and it photographs beautifully. But the food market is where the life is.

In there the aisles narrow until you can touch both walls, banked with sacks of dried beans, rice, and dark mountain coffee. Tomatoes and chillies blaze against the gloom. An old brass scale, worn smooth by decades of hands, weighs out a kilo of something while the vendor and the buyer argue the price out of habit more than disagreement. Everyone is busy and nobody is rushed.

The trick is to be useful, or at least welcome. Buy something. Ask the name of the strange fruit. Let people see you are there for the place and not just for the picture. By mid-morning the aisles are a slow river of people and the air goes thick and warm, and that is the frame I want: not an empty postcard, but the honest, generous crush of a town feeding itself.