Roofing in El Salvador

El Salvador is a small, volcanic country on the Pacific coast of Central America. It holds unusually well-preserved ancient house roofs, at the buried village of Joya de Cerén, and a long tradition of earthen houses built to cope with frequent earthquakes.

Climate and hazards

• Earthquakes. On 13 January 2001 a magnitude 7.7 earthquake killed at least 944 people in El Salvador, and 108,261 houses collapsed; a second earthquake one month later killed a further 315. Landslides in Santa Tecla and Comasagua caused most of the deaths in La Libertad department.
• Volcanic eruptions. An earlier eruption of the Ilopango caldera, usually dated to the 5th or 6th century CE, had blanketed much of central El Salvador in ash, and a later eruption of the Loma Caldera vent around 600 CE buried Joya de Cerén.
• Hurricanes and tropical storms. Hurricane Mitch in 1998 killed 240 people and damaged more than 10,000 houses.

Roofing history

Ancient. At Joya de Cerén, a Maya farming village, volcanic ash preserved houses, storehouses, a kitchen, a sweat bath and communal buildings. Household buildings had walls of wattle and daub (bajareque) and adobe columns, and public buildings used rammed earth. Excavators found thick thatched roofs carried on timber poles that rose from the walls, with eaves projecting well beyond the walls. The site was inscribed by UNESCO in 1993.

Colonial and later. Spanish colonial towns used adobe and bahareque walls with clay tile roofs.

Modern. Metal sheet, fibre-cement sheet and reinforced concrete became the main roofing materials in the 20th century. The 2001 earthquakes destroyed large numbers of older houses.

Traditional and vernacular roofs

• Bahareque: a frame of poles or cane with woven sticks plastered with mud, carrying a thatch or tile roof; UNESCO notes its good earthquake resistance at Cerén.
• Teja roofs on adobe and bahareque houses in older towns.
• Thatch in rural areas, now rare.

Roofing today

Metal sheet and fibre-cement sheet are common on houses, and concrete slabs on urban buildings.

Codes, standards and regulation

A 2012 comparative review listed El Salvador's Norma Técnica para Diseño por Sismo (NTDS) of 1997 as the seismic design code then in force.

Notable roofs

• Joya de Cerén (UNESCO 1993): some of the most complete evidence of ancient Mesoamerican thatched roofs, preserved under volcanic ash.

Local roofing terms

• Bajareque or bahareque: wattle-and-daub construction.
• Teja: clay tile.
• Lámina: metal sheet.
• Tabanco: a raised pole platform or loft inside a house, recorded at Cerén.