Hi, I’m David — Let Me Show You My El Salvador

People ask me how I got into this. The honest answer? I never really set out to be a tour guide. I just couldn’t stand watching visitors come to my country and leave having seen almost none of it.

I grew up here, in San Salvador. Spent my childhood being dragged up volcanoes by my family, swimming under waterfalls that don’t show up on any map, eating pupusas off griddles run by women who’ve been making them the same way for forty years. To me that was just… normal. Then I started meeting travelers who’d flown halfway around the world, stayed three days, seen the inside of a hotel and one crowded beach, and gone home thinking that was El Salvador. And it drove me a little crazy. Because they’d missed it. All of it.

So I started showing people around. First friends of friends, then friends of those friends, and somewhere along the way it turned into ES Tours.

What ES Tours actually is

Here’s the short version: it’s me, a comfortable air-conditioned 7-seater, and a deep, slightly obsessive knowledge of this country. That’s it. No big bus, no rigid script, no rushing twelve strangers through a checklist so we can hit the gift shop by three.

Every trip I run is private. Just you — your partner, your family, your group of friends. We go at your pace. If you want to spend an extra hour on the crater rim because the light’s good, we stay. If you’d rather skip the museum and find the best fish on the lake instead, we do that. You’re not a ticket number to me. You’re a guest, and I treat the day like I’m showing my own cousins around.

And we talk. In English or Spanish — I’m fluent in both and happy to switch mid-sentence if that’s what helps. That part matters more than people expect. A lot of what makes a place click is the story behind it, and you can’t get that from a sign you can’t read.

Where I’ll take you

This is the fun part, because there’s so much, and it’s all so close together. We’re the smallest country in Central America. You can genuinely climb a volcano in the morning and watch the sun drop into the Pacific that same evening.

There’s the coffee tour to Concepción de Ataco — my personal favorite — where we visit Café Ataco and Entre Nubes and taste the Pacamara, a bean so rare it’s grown almost nowhere else on earth. There’s Santa Ana volcano with its impossible turquoise crater lake, paired with a lazy lunch on Lake Coatepeque. The seven waterfalls of Juayúa, where you climb and swim and jump if your nerves allow. The Tamanique falls and El Tunco beach for the people who want jungle and ocean in one day.

I take families to the monkey sanctuary, history lovers across the border to the Maya ruins at Copán in Honduras (don’t worry about the paperwork — I handle all of it), and pretty much everyone, at some point, up to El Boquerón to peer down into the crater that sits right above the capital. There’s the San Salvador city tour for the culture and the history, including things I lived through myself and can tell you about better than any guidebook.

And if none of those quite fit? We build something. Surf trip, photography route, a multi-day adventure, a corporate group that wants to actually bond instead of sit in a conference room — I design custom itineraries all the time. I also run straight-up private charters with the 7-seater: airport pickups, hotel transfers, a driver-guide for the day who knows which roads wash out in the rain and which back-road pupusería is worth the detour.

Why this, and not a big tour company

Look, I’m not going to pretend I’m the cheapest option, or the flashiest. I’m one guy with one van and a calendar that fills up. But that’s exactly the point.

When you book with ES Tours, you get the person who actually knows the farmers by name. Who knows which trail opens after the rains and which one’s still mud. Who’ll stop the van because there’s a minuta cart up ahead and you have to try one. The big operators can’t do that. They’re moving volume. I’m just trying to give you the El Salvador I’d want a friend to see.

I’ve had travelers tell me, at the end of a day, that it felt less like a tour and more like hanging out with a local who happened to know everything. That’s the best compliment I get. It’s the whole goal.

So — that’s me, and that’s ES Tours. If you’re thinking about coming, or you’re already here and wondering what’s worth your time, just message me. Tell me your dates, who’s coming, and what you’re curious about. I’ll come back with honest suggestions, not a sales pitch.

Let’s go see my country. I promise it’s better than the postcards.

— David Mejicanos, ES Tours · San Salvador