Colon Panama Hotels

The Colon Province of Panama is now the fourth most populated province, with a population of just over two hundred thousand souls. Located on the Atlantic Ocean end of the Panama Canal, on the Northern shore of Panama, the seaport city of Colon was located on a spot which history records as Manzanillo Island.

When gold was discovered in California in 1848, it provided the impetus for building a method of fast transportation across the narrow Isthmus of Panama. With plans in progress for the Panama Railroad, Manzanillo Island was linked with the mainland by American entrepreneurs; including William H. Aspinwall. The engineers innovated a drainage plan to allow them to construct the railhead by first drawing off enough water from the swamps on and around the island to be able to build on it and connect it by bridge to the mainland.

The Panama Railroad asked for bids to construct the track from the Atlantic shore to the Pacific shore. The construction contract was awarded to a company headed by George M. Totten and John G. Trautwine, who sent an order to New Orleans to have a small pine board shack built and shipped to him. This was the first permanent structure in what became the town of Aspinwall which was later called Colon.

Due to the tropical diseases malaria and yellow fever; it is estimated that more than 12,000 people died during the construction of the Panama Railroad. The true numbers will never be available, because many of the people keeping records died too, some of them from cholera contaminated food or water.
The Panama Railroad is the most expensive railroad built in the world. Building the forty seven miles of track that inaugurated the first inter-ocean railroad cost – in addition to the lives of twelve thousand people – eight million dollars and five painstakingly muddy and mosquito tortured years of work. The workers who cleared the land and laid the track were from all over the world, but as they died by the thousands; those who survived stood apart.