San Pedro Sula

San Pedro Sula is Honduras's second-largest city, in the Sula Valley in the country's northwest about 50 kilometers south of Puerto Cortes, with a metropolitan population of 1,445,598 as of 2023, the largest city in Central America that is not a national capital. Founded on June 27, 1536, by the conquistador Pedro de Alvarado, it declined for much of the colonial period before reviving in the late 1800s through banana cultivation and railroad building, which turned it into Honduras's industrial center. As of 2011 it generated about two-thirds of the country's gross domestic product, driven mainly by apparel manufacturing and trade.