Four days in León, Nicaragua: where the country keeps its poets and its revolutionaries

The cathedral is the reason to come and the first thing to do, ideally within an hour of it opening, because the part you want is the roof and it is in full sun. Construction started in 1747 and the building was inaugurated in 1780; the towers and the façade went on between 1810 and 1820, which is why the front looks later than the rest. It is the largest cathedral in Central America and a UNESCO site, and Rubén Darío is buried inside it under a lion.

Buy the separate roof ticket, take your shoes off, and go up. The roof is a field of whitewashed domes you walk between in bare feet, with the whole city on one side and a line of volcanoes running north from Momotombo on the other. Nothing else in the country looks like it. Down at ground level, Central Park in front is where León sits in the evening, and six of the eight streets meeting the square are now pedestrian.

Then cross the square to the Museum of the Revolution, which occupies the old Somoza-era government building and is not a museum in any conventional sense. The displays are thin and captioned in Spanish only. The guides are former Sandinista fighters who were in the street battles being described, they take you round themselves, and at some point one of them will point out a photograph of himself at nineteen with a rifle. Go up to the roof of this one too.

The Ortiz-Gurdián is the surprise of the city and probably of the country. Four colonial houses on the same block were knocked together to hold it, so you move through courtyard after courtyard with the collection on the walls: strong twentieth-century Nicaraguan and Latin American painting, some colonial religious work, some pre-Columbian pieces, and a European room with a Picasso, a Chagall and a Miró in it. Even if the art does not interest you, the buildings and the shade will.

Five minutes away is the house Rubén Darío grew up in, now a small museum of his manuscripts, furniture and belongings. Darío invented modernismo, which is to say he is the point at which poetry in Spanish stopped imitating Spain, and he is treated in Nicaragua roughly the way Shakespeare is treated in England. Azul, the 1888 collection that made his name, is on sale at the door and is a better souvenir than anything in the market.

Finish at the Recolección, three blocks north of the square: a church consecrated in 1788 with a Mexican Baroque front in an aggressive yellow, covered in twisted columns and medallions. It is the prettiest façade in a city with a lot of competition, and it looks best in the last hour of light.

Take the morning out to León Viejo, about forty minutes east on the shore of Lake Xolotlán. This is where the city was for its first eighty-odd years, until earthquakes and the volcano above it persuaded everybody to move west in 1610. What survives is the ground plan of an early colonial town, excavated and left low: the Calle Real running up to the plaza, the footings of the cathedral, the churches, the houses of the men who ran the place. Momotombo stands directly behind it and does most of the work.

It is a strange, flat, unrestored kind of site, and the interest is in how small it all is. This was the administrative centre of a Spanish province, and the whole thing would fit inside a village. The remains of the conquistador Pedrarias Dávila were found here, along with those of the man he had beheaded in the plaza; there is a small museum on the indigenous population of the lake shore, and shade is in short supply.

Come back for lunch, sit out the heat, and go west in the late afternoon. Sutiava was a separate indigenous town swallowed by León, and its church is one of the oldest and biggest here, plain rustic wood inside instead of gilt. Above it on a low hill stands El Fortín de Acosasco, a Somoza-era fort used to watch the city and hold political prisoners. It is a ruin now, and the reason to climb up is the view: León spread out below with the whole volcano chain behind it, at the hour when the light is worth it.

Start at the Centro Cultural Rigoberto López Pérez, a restored colonial house three blocks from the square with a very specific piece of history in it. On 21 September 1956 a 27-year-old poet from León walked into a party in this building and shot Anastasio Somoza García, the first of the three Somozas. The bodyguards killed him where he stood; the dictator was flown to the Canal Zone and died of the wounds a week later, and his sons ran the country for another twenty-three years. The house is now a small arts centre, with a mural by Ricardo Morales and almost nobody in it.

Then walk two blocks to San Francisco, built in 1639 and among the oldest churches in the city, next to what was the Franciscan convent before the friars were expelled in 1830. It sat closed for over a century and was put back together in the 1960s. There is a good bell tower, several fine altarpieces, and a statue outside of Saint Francis in conversation with a wolf.

If there is time before the bus, La Merced is on the way back to the square: a Baroque church of 1762 whose Mercedarian friars were thrown out in the same purge, holding a statue of the Virgin brought over from Barcelona. Then a last smoothie, and out.