Acelhuate River

The Acelhuate River (Spanish: Río Acelhuate) is a river in El Salvador which originates in the San Salvador Department and flows north into the Lempa River and the Cerrón Grande Reservoir. The city of San Salvador was established along the river in the mid-1500s for its clear waters, but it has since become one of El Salvador's most polluted rivers due to improper waste disposal from San Salvador beginning in the mid-1900s. Despite the river's high levels of contamination by domestic and industrial waste, several animal species continue to inhabit the river and around 1.7 million people live in the river's drainage basin.

The name "Acelhuate" derives from the Nawat spelling "Axolhuatl". The Nawat name is a combination of the words "axol", a type of flower, and "huatl" meaning "place".

The Acelhuate River originates in western San Salvador Department and flows north through the city of San Salvador, El Salvador's capital city. The river runs through the center of the San Salvador Department and along part of the northwestern border of the Cuscatlán Department. As a part of the Lempa River basin, the Acelhuate River ends at the Lempa River (the country's largest river) and the Cerrón Grande Reservoir in north-central El Salvador. The Acelhuate River has a drainage basin of 414 sq mi (1,070 km2), covering 5.1 percent of the country's land area, and is 37 miles (60 km) long. Several rivers flow into it, including the El Piro, Las Cañas, Sumpa, and Tomayate Rivers.

Between 900 and 1200, the Acelhuate River basin was inhabited by the Pipil. The Pipil abandoned the area around 1200 due to fighting with other Salvadoran indigenous groups. On 27 September 1546, the Spanish colonial city of San Salvador (originally founded in 1525) was reestablished along the Acelhuate River due to the river and its various tributaries providing the city an abundance of fresh water. At the time, the river's water was clear and suitable to grow crops around. In 1576, an oidor (judge) of San Salvador wrote to Spanish king Philip II describing the river's water as "very good and clear and without bad taste" ("muy buena y clara y sin ningún mal sabor"). In 1820, San Salvador council member Mariano Francisco Gómez reported to the Spanish parliament that the city's residents bathed in the river's waters and caught fish, mollusks, pearls, tortoiseshell, and murex. On 12 June 1922, heavy rains caused the Acelhuate River to overflow in parts of San Salvador and Colón. The floods killed hundreds of people, destroyed buildings, blocked roads, and caused landslides. During La Matanza, a series of Salvadoran government mass killings in early 1932, the Directorate General of Police executed hundreds communist and Pipil rebels and buried them in mass graves along the Acelhuate River. On 3 July 2008, 30 people were killed when a bus fell into the Acelhuate River during a storm; those killed were members of the Misión Cristiana Elim Internacional church. As of 2018, around 1.7 million people in 19 districts live in the Acelhuate River's drainage basin.

The Acelhuate River is one the most contaminated and polluted rivers in El Salvador. The river functions as a drainage for untreated domestic and industrial waste improperly disposed from San Salvador which flows into the Cerrón Grande Reservoir in north-central El Salvador, polluting that body of water in the process. A 2015 Salvadoran government survey estimated that domestic waste composed 62 percent of pollutants in the river, industrial waste composed 32 percent, and garbage dumped in the river or caught by rainfall composed the remaining 6 percent. Industrial materials such as iron, arsenic, lead, mercury, and zinc are dumped into the river by factories. During El Salvador's dry season (November to April), the river

Flows through: El Salvador.

River data from Wikidata (CC0); lengths normalised to a common unit.