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Nov 5 (Reuters) - Nicaragua votes for a new president on Sunday. Here are some facts about the country.

* A land of tropical forest, vast lakes and smoking volcanoes, Nicaragua is the largest country in Central America, around the size of New York state. Its population is 5.14 million, with an estimated 800,000 Nicaraguans having emigrated to the United States, Costa Rica and El Salvador.

* A 1972 earthquake destroyed most of the capital Managua, killing thousands of people and turning the lively city center into a no man's land of ruins and wasteland that still exists today. Since the quake, most of Managua's streets have no names, and addresses are given as being a number of blocks away from an existing or former landmark.

* Nicaragua was colonized by Spain in the early 1500s, attracting European pirates who plundered the Caribbean coast for two centuries. William Walker, one of the unauthorized U.S. adventurers, or "filibusters," who led armed expeditions to Latin America in the 19th century, declared himself president in 1856 and tried to impose slavery and the English language. Neighboring Central American states drove him out.

* Nicaragua still bears the scars of its 1980s civil war, which pitted Daniel Ortega's revolutionary left-wing Sandinista government against U.S.-backed Contra rebels at the height of the Cold War. Some 30,000 Nicaraguans were killed in the fighting, inflation skyrocketed and food was rationed.

* The coffee-exporting nation is the second-poorest country in the Western Hemisphere after Haiti, with around 70 percent of people living on less than $2 a day. Per capita gross domestic product, or GDP, is around $700 and rampant oil prices have exacerbated a power generation shortfall and daily blackouts.

* Hurricane Mitch, one of the deadliest storms to hit Central America, ravaged northern Nicaragua in 1998, causing devastating mudslides that killed an estimated 3,800 people and left several hundred thousand homeless.

* Despite its history of war and disasters, Nicaragua is rich with folk music, tropical fruit, Spanish colonial buildings and the drumbeats of the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean coast. Nicaraguans boast that their biggest lake is home to a rare and vicious freshwater shark -- although it appears to have been hunted to extinction.

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