But even now, the rising waters are ruining the villagers' meagre livelihood. At low tide each day, the men in this community of 22 families wade through the mud collecting punche, a local species of crab.
A full day's backbreaking work can yield two dozen crabs, which fetch around £2.50 on the local market. It is the only cash income the people of La Tirana have and they need it to buy basics such as clothing and cooking oil. For their own food, they rely on fishing and subsistence agriculture, growing corn, rice and vegetables, and rearing chickens and ducks.
"We can't take too many punche because we have to make sure that the species survives, and that there will be enough for our children," says Nahun Diaz Ramirez, the 26-year-old mayor of La Tirana. Despite the evidence before his eyes, he is finding it difficult to adjust to the fact that, on current trends, his three children aged two to five, may never get the chance to go crab-hunting.
According to El Salvador's Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources (MARN), this country will lose somewhere between 10 per cent and 28 per cent of its coastal territories in the next century as a result of rising seas caused by climate change.
The lower figure is based on an anticipated sea level rise of 13cm and the higher figure on a rise of 110cm, the two extremes of the range predicted by some current climate modelling. Yet as both locals and the research of the United Nations' climate science task force, the IPCC, attest, the process has already started.
But the people of La Tirana, with no electricity, running water or sewerage, are far from the only vulnerable citizens of El Salvador to have their lives turned upside down. Devastating storms increasingly batter the Central American nation. Meanwhile, the ravaging of its forests has left natural drainage systems unable to cope.
After decades of indiscriminate logging, only 2 per cent of El Salvador's original forests remain. In the Western Hemisphere, only Haiti has seen a larger proportion of its forest cover destroyed. The result is that, when sudden heavy rains do occur, there are massive, sometimes catastrophic flash floods along the lower reaches El Salvador's main river, the Lempa.
"There is no doubt that the deforestation has left El Salvador even more vulnerable to climate change and the storms it is increasingly bringing," says Ricardo Navarro, director of CESTA, the national branch of Friends of the Earth.
There was only one extreme storm in each of the 1960s and 1970s, and two in the 1980s, according to data released by MARN. But in the 1990s there were four, including Hurricane Mitch in 1998, which killed thousands across Central America. In the last decade, there were eight. So far, in this decade there has already been one, a massive tropical depression in October last year, named 12E by scientists. It lasted 10 days and saw between 762mm and 1513mm of rain, depending on where in the country it was measured. The higher figure was roughly equivalent to the country's average annual rainfall in the 1970s, 80s and 90s.
"The flood destroyed my whole harvest," says Herminia Arqueta, who lives in the village of Octavio Ortiz, beside the mouth of the Lempa about a mile from La Tirana. "My house was flooded for three weeks and we had to free all the chickens and ducks, otherwise they would have died." More
