Post date: Nov 13, 2013 2:51:48 AM
Most cooking here is over bottled gas (propane or butane) stoves, although the poorest people, especially in rural areas where firewood is readily available, use wood. While bottled gas is not cheap, it is less expensive than wood - as long as you include the costs of poor health that result from breathing the smoke from wood fires.
Some street food is cooked over charcoal fires. There is a new bakery with a wood-fired brick oven in Granada.
Another source of heat is the sun. While I found numerous installers and installations of solar hot water in Mexico, there are far fewer in Nicaragua. Masaya recently completed solar hot water installations in eight bakeries (largely for washing) as a demonstration pilot project. A León hotel project was completed by a company from El Salvador. Having seen installations in Mexico dating from 1983, the technology is not complex, the systems are robust and require no maintenance. Would seem like a natural for Nicaragua.
A big user of fire is ceramics. While there is a brick-making center west of Managua, there are many potters in Los Pueblos Blancos, the hills above Masaya. Many of these potters do very fine work, and most use wood-fired kilns, which require considerable mastery to produce quality ceramics without a lot of breakage.