15 September 2026 · Santa Isabel Ishuatán, El Salvador
The fifteenth of September is Independence Day here, and on this stretch of coast you don't watch it from the pavement. You ride in it. I rented a horse from a stable up the coast, strapped the 360 camera to the saddle, and joined the cabalgata into Santa Isabel Ishuatán.
A cabalgata is a parade on horseback, and that undersells it. Riders came in from every lane and farm track for miles: cowboy hats, plaid shirts, bandanas, boots in the stirrups, some horses under red saddle blankets. Dozens of them, then more, all funnelling down the same dirt lanes under the palms, past the chain-link and the tin-roofed sheds, at the easy walk of people who have done this every year of their lives. Nobody hurried. Nobody needed to.
The horse knew the drill better than I did. The camera sat just left of the pommel, so every frame I have is the view over its ears with the mane filling half the picture, which is roughly how it felt from up there too.
In town the whole place had come out. People gathered under the big trees, a municipal tent with a table and coolers, the riders milling in the lane waiting their turn. The main event is the carreras de cinta, the ribbon races. The idea, as it was explained to me: a line is strung across the track with small rings hanging from ribbons, and a rider comes through at a gallop and tries to take a ring with a short stick.
I didn't see the end of it. Midday on the coast in September is serious heat, and after a morning in the saddle it got the better of me, so I handed the horse back and went home early. The camera, to its credit, kept going a while longer than I did.
Late in the afternoon, once the heat broke, I was back on a horse for a different kind of ride: down onto the black sand under a grey sky, another rider out ahead of me, the surf on one side and the palms on the other, at a gallop because the beach was empty and there was no reason not to.
None of it was put on for visitors. It was a town celebrating its country the way it does every year, and it let a stranger on a rented horse ride along.
Ledger: one rented horse, one 360 camera on the saddle, one Independence Day. The heat won.