This past 19 February, the Festival of Diablos and Congos was celebrated once again in Portobelo, in the province of Colón.

Folkloric Congo groups from the Atlantic coast, and especially from the town of Portobelo, participated in the event, a magnificent display of art and culture.

Several Diablos groups came from the city of Colón for the Festival as well. The recently restored Royal Customshouse (Real Aduana) and the nearby San Jeronimo Fort of Portobelo were the setting for the event.

This event and the town of Portbelo itself are symbols of the cultural wealth of the Afro-Panamanians and Panamá as a whole. The Festival of Diablos and Congos represents the profound syncretism of the African and Spanish cultures.

 

Colon is all the tropic ports of Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham. Rightly so. Every street corner and bar here knows ten thousand tales as exuberant or as melancholy or as cockeyed or as ironic as any those two travellers spun.

Colon is a strange town which has
relished bonanzas and endured depressions throughout its history.

The town was born around the time when California-bound Fortyniners added gold fever to the other fevers that Colon endured in those days of trying to find its landfill footing on the mangrove island that had been declared the Atlantic terminal of the Western Hemisphere’s first transcontinental railroad.