Guatemala Serves Pizza Cooked on Volcano Lava

David Garcia places a pizza on a lava river that comes down from the Pacaya volcano at the Cerro Chino hill in San Vicente Pacaya municipality, Guatemala on Wednesday. (AFP)
David Garcia places a pizza on a lava river that comes down from the Pacaya volcano at the Cerro Chino hill in San Vicente Pacaya municipality, Guatemala on Wednesday. (AFP)
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Guatemala Serves Pizza Cooked on Volcano Lava

David Garcia places a pizza on a lava river that comes down from the Pacaya volcano at the Cerro Chino hill in San Vicente Pacaya municipality, Guatemala on Wednesday. (AFP)
David Garcia places a pizza on a lava river that comes down from the Pacaya volcano at the Cerro Chino hill in San Vicente Pacaya municipality, Guatemala on Wednesday. (AFP)

Guatemala's Pacaya volcano has been erupting since February, keeping local communities and authorities on high alert. But for David Garcia, the streams of molten lava oozing down the mountainside have become his kitchen.

Garcia, a 34-year-old accountant, serves up "Pacaya Pizza" cooked on the smoldering volcanic rock to awed tourists and locals.

"Many people today come to enjoy the experience of eating pizza made on volcanic heat," Garcia told AFP from a rocky area that leads to the Pacaya crater, and which he's converted into his workplace.

In his makeshift kitchen, Garcia spreads the dough on a metal platter that can resist temperatures up to 1,000 degrees Celsius (1,800 degrees Fahrenheit), slathers it with tomato sauce, a generous helping of cheese and pieces of meat. Wearing protective clothing from head to his military style boots, Garcia places the pizza on the lava.

"It's done, just let the cheese melt some more," he announces 10 minutes later.

"That pizza looks so good!" exclaims one of the tourists as the cheese bubbles.

Garcia's kitchen has become a magnet for tourists that work up an appetite climbing the massive volcano -- one of three active ones in Guatemala -- located just 25 kilometers (15 miles) south of the capital.

He first started baking pizzas on the mountain side in 2013 in small caverns he found amongst the rocks.

"I didn't sell much the first few days," said Garcia, whose fame has now spread throughout social media.

In recent weeks, with Pacaya regularly spitting out molten rock, he started cooking the pizzas directly on the moving lava, some of which has come close to population centers. It's a potentially risky undertaking given the plumes of volcanic ash blasted into the sky by the angry beast, putting local villagers at great risks.

"Having a pizza cooked in the embers of a volcano is mind-blowing and unique in the whole world," said Felipe Aldana, a tourist trying out one of Garcia's specialties.

He found about the pizza joint on Facebook and thought: "I have to have this experience."

"It's ridiculous just thinking that you're going to eat something cooked on lava, but it's something that you can see only here" in Guatemala, said Kelt Van Meurs, a Dutch visitor.



Australia Sweats Through Hottest 12 Months on Record

Australia has just sweltered through its hottest 12 months on record, a period of drenching floods, tropical cyclones and mass coral bleaching. DAVID GRAY / AFP/File
Australia has just sweltered through its hottest 12 months on record, a period of drenching floods, tropical cyclones and mass coral bleaching. DAVID GRAY / AFP/File
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Australia Sweats Through Hottest 12 Months on Record

Australia has just sweltered through its hottest 12 months on record, a period of drenching floods, tropical cyclones and mass coral bleaching. DAVID GRAY / AFP/File
Australia has just sweltered through its hottest 12 months on record, a period of drenching floods, tropical cyclones and mass coral bleaching. DAVID GRAY / AFP/File

Australia has just sweltered through its hottest 12 months on record, a weather official said Thursday, a period of drenching floods, tropical cyclones and mass coral bleaching.

Senior government climatologist Simon Grainger said the rolling 12-month period between April 2024 and March 2025 was 1.61 degrees Celsius (34.9 degrees Fahrenheit) above average -- the hottest since records began more than a century ago.

"This is certainly part of a sustained global pattern," he told AFP.

"We've been seeing temperatures since about April 2023 that were globally much warmer than anything we have seen in the global historical record."

The previous hottest period was in 2019, Grainger said, when temperatures were 1.51 degrees Celsius above average.

"That is a pretty significant difference," Grainger said.

"It's well above what we would expect just from uncertainties due to rounding. The difference is much larger than that."

The record was measured on a rolling 12-month basis -- rather than as a calendar year.

Australia has also recorded its hottest-ever March, Grainger said, with temperatures more than two degrees above what would normally be seen.

"There has basically been sustained warmth through pretty much all of Australia," he said.

"We saw a lot of heatwave conditions, particularly in Western Australia. And we didn't really see many periods of cool weather -- we didn't see many cold fronts come through."

Sickly white coral

From the arid outback to the tropical coast, swaths of Australia have been pummeled by wild weather in recent months.

Unusually warm waters in the Coral Sea stoked a tropical cyclone that pummeled densely populated seaside hamlets on the country's eastern coast in March.

Whole herds of cattle have drowned in vast inland floods still flowing across outback Queensland.

And a celebrated coral reef off Western Australia has turned a sickly shade of white as hotter seas fuel an unfolding mass bleaching event.

The average sea surface temperature around Australia was the "highest on record" in 2024, according to a recent study by Australian National University.

This record run looked to have continued throughout January and February, said Grainger.

"We haven't seen much cooling in sea surface temperatures."

Moisture collects in the atmosphere as oceans evaporate in hotter temperatures -- eventually leading to more intense downpours and storms.

Australia follows a slew of heat records that have been toppling across the planet.

Six major international datasets confirmed that 2024 was the hottest year on record.

Scientists are unanimous that burning fossil fuels has largely driven long-term global warming.

Australia sits on bulging deposits of coal, gas, metals and minerals, with mining and fossil fuels stoking decades of near-unbroken economic growth.

But it is increasingly suffering from more intense heatwaves, bushfires and drought, which scientists have linked to climate change.