Natural History Museum of El Salvador

If you want to combine nature, fun and a learning experience about the natural history of El Salvador, this park will be the perfect choice.

Just 10 minutes from the dowtown San salvador, The Natural History Museum of El Salvador, is also known as Saburo Hirao EcoPark and a place of great educational value.

This park was built in 1976 at the old estate La Gloria with the help of Industrias Unidas Salvadoreñas (IUSA), a subsidiary of the Japanese company Yotobo Co. The name “Saburo Hirao “ is from the Japanese manager who helped with the donation.

Hirao wanted to have a place of healthy recreation for Salvadoran children, a place surrounded by nature, so the park retains more than 75 different species of trees, and has numerous gardens with waterfalls and fountains, some of them with an oriental style.

Within its 11 acres, this park also houses the Natural History Museum of El Salvador (MUHNES), a place of great importance for the studies on local biodiversity including fossils found in the El Salvador.

The museum has three permanent exhibition rooms where you can learn about nature with information discovered by leading biologists and paleontologists from El Salvador and from abroad.

These are:

1. Rocks and Mineral Room: where you will see the display of different types of igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic rocks. Minerals such as pink opal collected in the province of Santa Ana and much more.

2. Hall of Paleontology: shows the remains of creatures that lived in El Salvador 10 million years ago. Amazing fossils and items like: a skull replica of a saber-toothed tiger, mastodon molars as well as impressions of fish, frogs and leaves found on sedimentary rocks from at the province of San Vicente. Also a mastodon molar found by David J. Guzmán in early 1900, at Ilobasco, province of Cabañas.

3. Ecosystem room: where they recreate a cloud forest (such as Montecristo National Park, province of Santa Ana), a tropical dry forest (such as San Diego, near Metapán, province of Santa Ana) and a mangrove ecosystem