Reliable sources attest that some sixty years ago, during the wedding of a notable couple held in the church of Somoto, a herd of tired donkeys passed by and kicked up dust before the holy ground, and a pair of libertines from that group mated loudly beyond the temple walls. The matrimony was promptly suspended. They say that sometime in the early 1950s, an ingenious and lucrative idea dawned upon the imagination of the late don Salatiel Peña. The lack of water in the arid pueblo led don Salatiel to construct a well of his own and bring in donkeys from the interiors of Los Llanos de Oruse, a grassy plain on the Honduran frontier, by which means he would establish his home water delivery service. While at it, he also built cojinos, wooden vessels capable of carrying up to ten gallons of water; each donkey was fitted with two cojinos stopped with cobs of maize. All of which was put at the disposal of his clientele.The business flourished. Every delivery of two cojinos worth of water earned don Salatiel one cordoba. Those who lived during that quixotic time say without reservation that the donkeys arrived to and departed from his water spring so often that they finally learned to return to the well on their own and awaited there in file for new orders. But fortune was not eternal for the industrious don Salatiel. He had little choice but to decommission his fleet of donkeys with the inauguration of the municipal potable water service in the year 1957. In their vagrancy, the promiscuous donkeys errant reproduced and populated the dusty streets of Somoto in staggering numbers. Campesinos from the valleys arrived in Somoto to return home with a gratis donkey. A certain captain Fonseca of the ancien Guardia Nacional, set off on a sanitary campaign to punish the humble animals; he took the donkeys prisoner and deported them to a life of exile on the plains of Oruse.