Colon

About Colon

Colón is Panama's Caribbean-side cruise port and the staging point for partial-transit Panama Canal excursions at Gatun Locks. The Colón 2000 terminal is a secure shopping complex; venturing beyond it on foot is not recommended. Popular excursions are the canal partial-transit, the Embera indigenous village, and the Gatun Lake rainforest. The Panamanian balboa is pegged 1:1 to the US dollar, which circulates freely.

• Colón sits at the Atlantic entrance to the Panama Canal, making it one of the most strategically important port cities in the Western Hemisphere.
• The city was founded in 1850 as the Atlantic terminal of the Panama Railroad, originally built to speed gold-seekers across the isthmus during the California Gold Rush.
• Early in its history the city had two names — the English-speaking U.S. expatriate community called it 'Aspinwall' after railroad promoter William Henry Aspinwall, while the Spanish-speaking population called it Colón (Columbus) — a naming dispute that went on for decades.
• The city is built entirely on Manzanillo Peninsula, a former island that was connected to the Panamanian mainland by a causeway during railroad construction.
• Colón is home to the Colón Free Trade Zone, the largest free-trade zone in the Western Hemisphere, handling billions of dollars in merchandise annually.