Description of the attraction
The Honduras War Museum is housed in a former San Francisco barracks. The building is very old - in 1592 the monastery of San Diego de Alcalá was founded here, the left wing of which was destroyed in 1730. The barracks were built nearby in 1731 from adobe bricks on stone foundations; the floors and load-bearing walls were made of timber, the roofs were covered with clay tiles.
The structures of the San Diego de Alcalá monastery featured long corridors with arched ceilings supported by wooden columns; the monks' rooms were small and dark, inside the main building were a pantry, a kitchen, a dining room and study, a walking area, classrooms with benches for seminarians. Since 1802, Latin grammar, writing, arithmetic, philosophy and religion have been studied in the classrooms of the monastery.
In 1828, the monks were expelled from their cells, and the military base of the revolutionary troops was placed on the premises. For more than 100 years of subsequent history, the building was occupied by a printing house, a military school, a department of the National University and military headquarters. Many times the building has undergone repairs and rebuilding after damage during the next coup d'état.
Since 1983, this building has been occupied by the Museum of Military History of Honduras, which displays documents, weapons, ancient artifacts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1999, the Chief of the Joint Staff of the Armed Forces of Honduras, Brigadier General Daniel Lopez Carballo, ordered the complete restoration of the building to the Army Engineering Department. On May 2, 2014, the completely renovated Honduras Military History Museum was opened with new acquisitions, such as samples of military uniforms from the Second World War, new models of military aircraft, patrol boats, a helicopter used by the American military during the Vietnam War, etc.
