Magical Places

What makes a place magical as opposed to just out of the way?  

I was left with that thought as I got back from an immensely relaxing Holy Week trip to Solentiname, an archipelago in the lower part of Lake Nicaragua, with 2 fellow TEFLeras, Natalie and Isabel and Natalie's boyfriend, Rob. 

Solentiname is one of my favorite places in Rio San Juan, and certainly in Nicaragua. It's just so unexpected: a bunch of islands (36 to be exact) that rise out of blue lake and horizon, so seemingly random that they were explained in indigenous mythology as the body of a fleeing lover in a Romeo and Juliet-esque suicide pact. There's a certain weirdness to it, all of a sudden, a few houses, fields, and wooden docks rise out of the trees until it goes back to the realm of the trees and birds. People are scarcely visible, except occasionally at the docks or in fishing boats in the channels between the islands. 

Despite being fairly isolated and sparsely populated (population 1000 across 3 or so islands), they're linked to so much history: of the war against Somoza, of Liberation Theology, thanks to poet/priest Ernesto Cardenal, to art and culture, albeit in a very artificial way, as pointed out by a fellow PCV who had also visited. 

Even though the dry season had robbed the islands of the green crowns that they enjoyed the last time I visited in rainy June, they were bursting more than ever with birds: small colorful song birds, parakeets, oropendolas, which make crazy noises and build distinctive long hanging nests. We hung out a lot on Mancarron, the largest island, where we were staying, visiting artists and taking walks around to various places, like the museum which improbably is home to a flock(?) of peacocks, and wandering through people's fields, past some beautiful views out to other islands, until we chanced across the most random and isolated baseball field I've ever seen in my life. Talk about soft power. 

We also took the boat over to nearby San Fernando one day and wandered around, watching gigantic flocks of migrating ducks from the porch of the museum and going for an impromptu dip in a swimming hole off a very random and poorly marked trail. All very chill. 

And magical as it were. I was thinking about it though: what is it that makes travelers use the word "magical" in response to places in the developing world, and so reticent to use it in our own context? Is there something about nature in developed places and spaces that makes it less exciting to us? Can magical only be used to exoticize? Or are we just so jaded that we have to be taken out of our element to recognize the magicalness in places?