Masaya Volcano

Declared in 1979, it was Nicaragua's first national park and protects one of the few volcanoes in the world where visitors can drive right up to the rim of the active crater. The 16th-century Spanish conquistadors, alarmed by the night glow of its lava and its columns of smoke, named it "the mouth of hell" and even planted a wooden cross on its rim in 1529 in an attempt to exorcise what they took to be a literal entrance to the Christian underworld. It is also one of the few places in the world where a population of Nicaraguan parrot nests directly inside the walls of the active crater, seemingly immune to the sulphurous gases that would be lethal to most birds.