Getting around SAL
San Salvador’s airport carries the name of a saint: renamed by legislative decree in 2020 for Monseñor Óscar Arnulfo Romero, the archbishop Pope Francis canonized in 2018, after four decades as simply the Aeropuerto Internacional El Salvador that state authority CEPA built with Japan’s Hazama Gumi and opened in January 1980 — and still operates directly today. CEPA itself describes the airport as a “HUB” for one of the region’s leading carriers, and by mid-2026 it connected nonstop to 30 cities in 12 countries, six new airlines and eight new routes added under the current administration alone, including nonstop Madrid service that Avianca launched in June 2026, with Air Europa’s own route set to follow that December. Check-in still runs through the original passenger terminal’s 122 counters, but every arriving passenger now crosses a 34-metre walkway into a separate, US$50-million Terminal de Llegadas — a 24,000-square-metre building shaped like a breaking wave — where 73 migration desks clear most travelers in 30 seconds to a minute, and out of the airport in under half an hour. In 2025 the airport carried more than 5.2 million passengers.
