Disorientation several blocks south of a place with no address

MANAGUA LETTER:Asking the name of a street can earn you blank stares in a capital city still enduring the dilapidation of a decades-old earthquake

IN MANAGUA it is always Christmas. Nearly every public space has huge poles dangling cables of coloured lights in a garish approximation of Christmas trees brightening up the night all year around.

The reason behind turning the annual Christmas decorations into a permanent feature of the city’s skyline depends on who you ask. Some say it is the government’s way of trying to cheer up the locals – make them feel like it’s Christmas every day, so to speak.

This theory is plausible. Managua is a pretty sorry affair – the shabby capital of Nicaragua, the poorest country in the Americas after devastated Haiti, according to the World Bank.

But others will tell you they became permanent fixtures as part of a government effort to stop supporters of the opposition congregating in public spaces.

They did so in large numbers after widespread fraud in local elections in 2008 and President Daniel Ortega had to send in his Sandinista thugs to run them off. The huge metallic trees, according to this theory, are a ruse to stop them returning.

Indeed, instead of stars, many of the trees have signs perched on top with the not-so-festive message “Viva la Revolucion!” Ortega, a bête noir of the Reagan administration during the 1980s, beams down from roadside billboards across the city.

But you have to be careful looking up when driving on the streets of Managua. There is a mafia at work stealing manhole covers for their scrap metal value. Taxi drivers are pretty nifty about swerving around the treacherous traps that would undoubtedly wreck their typically battered cars’ suspensions, but it does lead to several close shaves with cars in the lane alongside you.

This is a dilapidated city – several quiet, upscale neighbourhoods aside – and one that has still not recovered from an earthquake almost four decades ago. The old centre was devastated and is still largely abandoned.

At the site of what was once the bustling central market there is now a deserted open square whose only occupants are a shepherd and some goats munching on the tall grass growing up from the cracks in the concrete.

Nearby is the city’s old cathedral, a ruined monument to the tragedy in which more than 5,000 people died and which left two-thirds of the city’s one million inhabitants homeless. Its structure was designed in and shipped from Belgium in the 1920s, and survived the deadly earthquake of 1931 – only to be wrecked 41 years later.

Once the rubble of the old centre was bulldozed away there was no money to rebuild and anyway, most residents feared to try, moving further out in the hope of finding safety from seismic activity.

Poverty has forced some to return. A few open, deserted blocks away from the ruined cathedral is the neighbourhood of Rubén Darío. Named after one of the greatest poets produced by a people who revere bards like few have since the ancient Greeks, this slum is where he who lives is the one quickest with a pistol, to quote a local saying.

Despite some development in recent decades, if a ghastly new presidential palace can be called that, what was once the city’s heart remains an open wound that looks set never to heal.

This means that as well as feeling dilapidated, Managua is disorientating. How do you find your bearings in a city with no centre? The southern shore of Lake Xolotlán might have once provided a reference point. It marks the city’s northern boundary and could have been a major amenity around which the city relaxed. But it too is something of a wasteland, polluted by the untreated sewage dumped in it over decades.

The zone that can probably be called the new downtown takes as its urban model the soulless suburban cities of the American southwest.

Its main drag is a multi-lane highway with shopping malls, business parks and casinos. Finding your way around this sprawl is made all the more difficult by the curious fact that most of Managua – home to 1.8 million souls – lacks street names. Locals are convinced the U2 song Where the Streets Have No Name was written about their city.

This means directions take on an absolute value. A typical address might be: Masaya highway at the TipTop chicken restaurant, two blocks south, in front of the Sampson cake shop. Asking the name of the street of your final destination will draw blank stares. Once, it seems, there was an effort to name all the city’s streets but it was abandoned long before completion.

So finding your way around will usually mean looking out for a well known landmark – whether a Pharaoh’s Casino, Mormon temple or Pizza Hut – and then navigating a certain number of blocks north, south, east or west.

Pack a compass.