River · Nicaragua
Río Coco
Río Coco is the longest river of Nicaragua and of all Central America. It flows east through rainforest and along the border with Honduras. Finally it reaches the Caribbean Sea.
Picture credit: SLR Images (CC BY 2.0) · Pitxiquin (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Olivia Wall (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where is the Río Coco?
The river starts here: Mountains of northern Nicaragua.
It ends in the Caribbean Sea at Cabo Gracias a Dios.
Countries on the river: Nicaragua.
The story behind it
The Río Coco is the great road of the Miskito people, who live in villages of wooden houses on stilts along its banks. Children paddle to school in dugout canoes, and traders bring salt, tools and medicine upstream while bananas, rice and beans travel down. Because the river forms the border between Nicaragua and Honduras for hundreds of kilometres, the two countries have long argued about exactly where the line runs and how long the river really is; older books give quite different figures. Toucans and howler monkeys call from the forest, and turtles rest on sandbanks in the low season. When a hurricane crosses the coast, the water can rise many metres in a night and sweep away whole gardens, so people rebuild their homes again and again.
Questions children ask
How long is the Río Coco?
It is usually given as about 841 kilometres. Some books name other numbers, because the border river has been measured in different ways. Whichever figure is used, it remains the longest river in Central America.
Which countries does the Río Coco flow through?
Where does the Río Coco end?
It flows into the Caribbean Sea at Cabo Gracias a Dios. The cape is a flat corner of land with lagoons, sand and palm trees. Storms move the sandbanks there almost every year.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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