Granada - the city in the south of Nicaragua, not its namesake on the other side of the Atlantic - is, in spite of its relative obscurity, one of the gems of Central America, with its fine churches and elegantly proportioned porticoes, a volcano rising raggedly above it and Lake Nicaragua shimmering at its feet.

It is also one of the first cities Spain founded in the New World in 1524. So it was apt that when the Spanish government's Agency for International Co-operation, or AECI, launched a variety of projects in Latin America in 1992 (commemorating the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's discovery of the Americas), it included a plan for Granada's historic centre.