Honduras, officially the Republic of Honduras, is a country in Central America, bordered to the west by Guatemala, to the southwest by El Salvador, to the southeast by Nicaragua, to the south by the Pacific Ocean, at the Golf of Fonseca, and to the north by the Gulf of Honduras and the Caribbean Sea. Once part of Spain's vast empire in the New World, Honduras became an independent nation in 1821. After two and a half decades of mostly military rule, a freely elected civilian government came to power in 1982.