Panama struggles to preserve 500-year history while maintaining locals’ cultural identity

By Lauren Thomas

PORTOBELO, Panama – From the lookout point of the remains of Fort San Fernando, miles of the Caribbean ocean stretch to the west. South of the fort, the small town of Portobelo surrounds a quiet bay laden with hundreds of structures built into the ruins from the thriving Spanish port city that existed centuries ago.

“There are literally dozens of families here that live in two areas that used to be old colonial structures. You can go into one of their back rooms and find one of the walls that’s over 400 years old, and they’ve just built on top or around the original pieces,” said Jason Ashcroft, 33, local Portobelan and tour guide.

Fort San Lorenzo is just the latest example of a relocation effort unsupported by some of the people it affects. For decades, the government has worked to move residents away from historical landmarks in Panama in order to better protect the sites and turn them into economic engines of tourism. However, many factors pose challenges to the upkeep of these locations including climate change, vandalism, trespassing and the habitation of Spanish descendants within the sites who refuse to move. 

In recent years, non-governmental organizations have been successful in reviving Panama Viejo in Panama City, declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2003, by removing inhabitants and barring entry without payment. Efforts to do the same with the Caribbean fortifications are just getting underway. But the process so far has buckled under the resistance of locals who are loath to give up their ancestry and their homes. 

“These people from [Portobelo] have those direct routes from the first people brought over from Africa,” Ashcroft said. “Certain members of the community [have] gone to great lengths to preserve what little can be found out about their cultural past and their identity. They’re prepared to fight, tooth and nail, anybody who wants to just come and take it away from them.”

On the Pacific: Panama Viejo

Panama Viejo, located along the Pacific coast in the middle of present day Panama City and a major port during Spanish occupation, has been a well-protected tourist attraction since Patronato, a private-public historical conservation organization based in Panama, took it over in 1995. Protected now by mangroves that form a natural seawall, Panama Viejo encompasses the remains of seven convents, two chapels, one cathedral and several other buildings. 

Before it was a historical site, Panama Viejo was entwined with Panama City so much that a busy road, Avenida Cincuentenario, runs over remains of one of the largest convents of the old city, and many homes were constructed on and around the ancient structures until the relocation in 2010.

“They could only recover [69 acres] of the [138 acres] that the city occupied a long time ago because the new city started growing and it grew over the old city,” said Natanael Guizado, a tour guide at Panama Viejo. “The fence is delimiting the part that was recovered, but if you were to look on the other side, you could see that houses were built on top of the remainings of the old town.”

According to Guizado, when residents still lived among the site, the neighborhood was dangerous, and some vandalism caused damage, but the people always treated it like an important piece of their cultural identity. Several stones on the wall of the old bell tower, which dates back to 1519, are inscribed with names of visitors, home countries and dates as old as 1876.

“My mom took me when I was young and I took my son when he was young. We would go there and walk around because it’s a huge open space and it was fun to walk around,” longtime resident of the area, Rosemary Vergara, said. “I think that we would go more often [if it was free] because we used to go.”

When Patronato set the boundaries for the historical site of Panama Viejo in 2007, people living within the site limits were paid by the government to move out of their homes that were built on top.

The chief director of the Patronato Panama Viejo site, Mirta Linero Baroni, recalls the community’s disdain when the relocation occurred.

“That was not a decision of Patronato Panama Viejo, it was a decision of the government,” Baroni said. “Patronato was trying to answer the instructions that UNESCO gave to the country for the declaration of the patrimonial sites. One of our duties was to take away the street. Patronato Panama Viejo asked for an allotment, but the government was the last word in the decision, and they decided to take it completely off site.”

The people who lived in the neighborhood were given just 15 to 20 days to move out and fought against the relocation by protesting.

“People weren’t really happy about being relocated because it wasn’t very well communicated, what was happening,” Vergara said. “Even now we are not very happy because we cannot access to see the ruins that is our own heritage. We felt that our way of life changed. They took out the sports fields and the petrol station and the access to the beach. We used to go and see the ocean and relax there.”

Before this relocation, the government held talks with the residents about how they wanted to go about moving, eventually landing on compensation to enable them to buy homes elsewhere. Some people felt the amount they received was sufficient, but others did not. Remnants of this relocation can still be seen in Panama Viejo today. The fence on the site limit touches one of the ancient walls inside, and walls of several new houses on the outside.

The revised neighborhood of Panama Viejo, which borders the historical site, now struggles with safety issues, threat of forced relocation and an identity crisis. A handful of houses, squeezed between Avenida Cincuentenario and the fence of the historical site, are often nearly missed by car accidents.

A resident of her one-story house in Panama Viejo for over 60 years, Vergara said the dynamic of the neighborhood changed after the relocation. Family members and friends moved to other areas of Panama, and non-Panamanians moved in from places like Colombia, Costa Rica and Honduras.

“Persons that can prove they were Panamanian residents in the surroundings of the site, and they were there all their life and always living there, Patronato recognizes them the right to enter the site for free, always, at any moment,” Baroni said. “But recently, we can say 50 to 60 years, the population has changed, and all the surroundings are being occupied by non-Panamanians.”

Retired now after serving as a military police officer, Vergara says she lives in constant frustration with the government and fear of being forced out of her home.

“The fear we have is actually that we might suffer the same destiny, the same fate,” Vergara said. “We were told that maybe we would have to move from here, so we might not invest a lot in our houses because it’s like ‘maybe we have to move later.’”

Today, the historical site of Panama Viejo has virtually no trespassers and does regular maintenance on the site through Patronato and local landscaping businesses.

In addition to grounds maintenance, archeologists visit the site annually to conduct excavations during the dry season. Each year, the team discovers more artifacts and uncovers more of Panama’s history to be preserved, like weapons and shells from the indigenous Cuevas people, that would otherwise be erased from history.

According to Guizado, some of the conditions of maintaining a UNESCO World Heritage Site are to make repairs when necessary to keep the site standing, and to make new restorations obvious so visitors understand which pieces are original.

On the Atlantic: Forts San Lorenzo and Fernando

Though Panama Viejo became a well-established tourist attraction, the situation on the Caribbean side is much different, where the Spanish forts are falling into disarray because of little maintenance and no solid tourism agency to provide steady visitors. Constructed in 1597, the fortifications protected the bays of Portobelo and Colon where the Spanish shipped gold from the interior back to Spain. 

Despite receiving the title of UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1980, the fortifications have been largely untouched by the local government, and it has been left to non-governmental organizations to maintain the crumbling attractions. Because the sites have not met UNESCO’s requirements, which mainly consist of making the site limits larger and creating a buffer zone between the forts and the inhabitants of the town, the fortifications have been on the list of World Heritage in Danger since 2012. Sites on this list are in danger of losing the characteristics that make them world heritage sites. The goal of the list is to encourage action to prevent this loss.

In the Colón province, Fort San Lorenzo has undergone several restoration projects, including one currently underway.

“The biggest problem of the sites is maintenance,” said Tomás Mendizábal, architect and staff researcher at Centro de Investigaciones Históricas, Antropológicas y Culturales. “San Lorenzo is starting to come around with the current restoration project and the new museum being built there. The problem of San Lorenzo is it’s far away and hard to get to, depending on the state of the roads.”

An hour east of Colon, Fort San Fernando is afflicted by more than just logistical obstacles.

“Our case [in Portobelo] has been really misappropriation of funds or disappearance of such, which is quite common in Latin America,” Ashcroft, the Portobelo guide, said. “Not a lot of importance [has been] placed by the local government here [because it is] in an area that’s kind of tucked away and doesn’t receive a lot of visitors. This province is always trying to push to keep up with the rest of the country that is already seeing more development and more tourism, despite the fact that we have more to offer out here. It just has a history of being forgotten about.”

Fort San Fernando shares the relocation challenge that afflicted Panama Viejo, with locals resisting government pressure to move out of their ancestral homes.

“We have the forts themselves, but we also have so many of the original historical structures in the village itself that are still being occupied that have actually been built on top of by the descendants of the people that were brought over to build them in the first place,” Ashcroft said. “It makes it very complicated — restoring old structures [and deciding] what really belongs to who when people have already lived there for so many generations.”

The Portobelan government has had no success in reaching an agreement with the current residents, of which over 100 would be affected by a relocation, according to Ashcroft.

Mistrust of government promises also contributes to the resistance to relocation efforts. Portobelans are reluctant to believe the government will provide them housing or appropriate funds to relocate.

“The area has been promised so many times before as far as development and support from the government and even external bodies, like UNESCO. Yet the townsfolk find themselves always living in the same poor conditions,” Ashcroft said. “It’s one of those things that whenever it gets brought up now it gets met with a roll of the eyes and very little assistance [from locals].”

Another challenge specific to Portobelo is the lack of an established tourism industry. Local guides, shops and restaurants have attempted to create a more steady infrastructure for tourists to visit Portobelo, but the lack of resources has prevented them from gaining much headway. Recent government support could be an opportunity to turn this around.

“At the moment, we have both the Ministry of Tourism and the Ministerio de Ambiente making a big push to turn Portobelo into one of the main places for tourism in the whole country,” Ashcroft said.

This year, the Inter-American Development Bank is preparing to give $200,500,000 to boost the tourism sector in Panama, some of which might be given to the historical sites. 

Ashcroft lists numerous changes that could be made to improve tourism, such as publishing about the fort online, incentivizing local hotels to promote visiting the site, informative plaques around the town, reopening the museum located in the old customs house and increasing the number of local guides.

“One of the other initiatives that I’m pushing is the fact that we have no park rangers really in this area,” Ashcroft said. “We have the National Park, but much like our UNESCO title, it’s just sort of an empty name, unfortunately, with not really any of the protection or benefits that would normally come with that.”

Logistical issues are just the start in terms of the problems that afflict Panama’s world heritage sites. In a scientific study published by Geosciences in 2018, researchers determined that climate change already impacts the sites, specifically the Caribbean fortifications which see more damage from salt crystals. According to the study, increases in rainfall cause “higher mechanical erosion and chemical deterioration due to water permeation in the structures.”

The study also blames the lack of adequate urban planning for enhancing the effects of climate change on the site. The goal of the research was to make assessments that local Panamanian organizations will use to restore and maintain the site.

“When we think about climate change, of course our mind goes immediately to disasters … and catastrophic events, but we have to be aware of the fact that also small changes of temperature and precipitation over time are going to cause damage and deterioration that may be, at the beginning, really subtle, but then it could arise to be irreversible if no action is undertaken,” said Alessandra Bonazza, a research scientist at the National Research Council of Italy who took part in the research.

While the potential is there to both preserve history and boost the economy of Colón and Portobelo through maintaining and promoting these sites, many obstacles stand in the way – not the least of which is locals’ mistrust of their government and its intentions. “Here in Panama, if you let the government take care of something, they ruin it,” said Jennifer Ceballos, who owns the Colon-based travel agency El Trip de Jenny.

For many, the conundrum remains of whether it is appropriate to force people out of their homes for the sake of better-preserving Panama’s history and sparking the local economy. Many locals stand firmly against relocation. “People are the patrimony, so if you move the people you take out everything,” Ceballos said.