This week’s dream: The Eden-like islands of Lake Nicaragua

Visiting Nicaragua’s Solentiname Islands is like walking into a painting by one of the islands’ renowned primitivist artists, said Steve Bailey in The New York Times. This archipelago at the southern end of vast Lake Nicaragua was little known beyond the nation’s borders until Father Ernesto Cardenal, a poet and political activist, established a parish on the largest island in the mid-1960s. Among his enduring contributions was encouraging residents to express themselves through art. This gave birth to an artists colony, and to a distinctive Solentiname style—“highly detailed oil and acrylic paintings of idealized rain forests” and lake scenes, often flecked with exotic birds.

My wife and I discover that there aren’t many places for visitors to stay, but we book one of the eight “bare-bones” rooms at Albergue Celentiname, on San Fernando Island (also known as Elvis Chavarría Island). The owner’s 18-year-old great-nephew, Ernesto, meets us on the mainland to help us catch a ferry from the town of San Carlos. His family’s inn doesn’t have hot water, but it does have a large porch with “the island’s best sunset views,” and it sits at the end of a waterfront walkway where painters gather to sell their work. The walkway also leads to the island’s one store and a tiny history museum. Nearby, a “haphazardly marked” trail “wends through a rain forest where fantastical trees drip with bromeliads and orchids and where the sound of footsteps prompts large, colorful birds to take flight.”

Though the other islands are “close enough for kayakers to paddle from one to another,” we take our hotel’s boat to get to Mancarrón, where Cardenal built his modest, open-air church. We also stop by the arts colony to watch artisans carve balsa wood to create colorfully painted fish, birds, frogs, and turtles. Afterward, we climb a hill toward Cardenal’s old cabin, which is connected to a deck owned by one of Ernesto’s relatives. While Ernesto and my wife angle for a better look at a couple of possum-like pacas that are hiding in some nearby hollow logs, I enjoy the pleasures that are already at hand—“a cold beer, a rocking chair, and a lake view.”

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At Albergue Celentiname—(011-505) 8893-1977—doubles start at $70.