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.

Canal construction followed and Colon and its adjacent port Cristobal, flourished as the waterway’s terminal as well. Colon then became one of the world’s busiest cruise ports as passengers from scheduled liners frolicked down gangplanks to shop on fabled Front Street.

After this boom in the nineteen fifties, Colon languished in an economic limbo until the last decade of the century, despite the Colon Free Zone which grew year by year and which now generates $10 billion per year in imports and exports.

Colon now seems poised for another boom. The railroad which had ground to a halt has been re-built. Four new ports, the biggest (Manzanillo International Terminal) which alone is bigger than Miami, are converting Colon into a giant transhipment center.

Colon is now experiencing a renaissance of the cruise ship business. The new cruise port, Colon 2000 and Pier 6 in Cristobal are receiving an increasing number of ships.