Gamboa: Life In The Canal Zone

Drive something like twenty kilometres down a dead end road, deeper and deeper into the rainforest, the Panama Canal to your left, until eventually you reach the waters of the Chagres River. Cross the narrow, low slung bridge over the river….and enter Gamboa.

Gamboa is a place with an unusual history which is absolutely tangible as we walk past the mostly empty, odd looking box shaped timber houses, through the sultry, dripping rainforest yet feeling almost as if we’re in a residential street. Jungle sounds are all around, agoutis scurry past our feet and howler monkeys call overhead yet we could just as easily be walking through American military quarters. Some places are steeped in ancient history, some are more modern: Gamboa is neither, or maybe a bit of both, a recently constructed town which is now all but deserted after a short yet important lifespan.

This is the point where the mighty Chagres River feeds the Panama Canal, the point where the valleys were intentionally flooded to form Gatun Lake during the canal’s construction. Gatun Lake is the widest part of the canal and effectively the water source for the canal itself and so its creation was essential for the success of the project, despite the need to submerge several tribal villages in the process. “Mighty” is an appropriate adjective for the Chagres as nearly 60% of all the run-off water of the entire country ends up in this one river.

So what are those houses, what exactly is Gamboa’s unusual history?

Before construction of the canal, the nearest settlements to Gamboa were Santa Cruz and Las Cruces, homesteads of the indigenous Embera people living deep in the rainforest and alongside the river. When the Panama Railway was completed in 1855 and the area was first mapped in detail, none of the maps show any trace of a town in the place where Gamboa now stands.

It was, of course, construction of the canal which gave birth to Gamboa, first built to house the so called “silver roll” workers and their families. The “silver roll” workers were essentially the non-white, non-American section of the canal workforce, paid around half of the amount paid to American whites doing precisely the same work, provided with minimal medical care and given sub-standard food whilst their white colleagues enjoyed a completely different, more elevated lifestyle. It’s a truly shocking fact that the reason that there is no official tally of the number of deaths during the canal’s construction, is that only the deaths of whites were recorded – deaths among the silver roll were not considered relevant enough for records to be kept.

When the canal was completed in 1914, Gamboa’s population moved on, leaving just 173 inhabitants behind – until, that is, the Canal Dredging Company moved its HQ here in the 1940s. And now the town had its heyday, the population rising to 3,853 by 1942. New multi-family dwellings, those unusual looking houses which look so out of place here, were constructed using timber from the sequoia trees of Northern California, the new inhabitants (by decree, whites only) building a railroad station, a civic centre, a school and no less than five churches together with, reportedly, a strong sense of community.

This resurgence of Gamboa was to be short lived. Over the next few decades, much of the dredging company’s operations were moved to the capital, and those timber houses and civic amenities, so recently constructed, were steadily deserted and the population once again dwindled. Now, in 2023, the strange former town sits mostly in silence, a shadow of its former self. A short-lived, once thriving community with its slightly strange communal houses now stands largely, but not totally, uninhabited, the houses like small scale apartment blocks deep in the sweltering rainforest. It’s an incongruous sight.

But here’s another twist. Improvement of roadways and the upswing in Panama’s economy since acquiring control of the canal mean that this remote-feeling corner of riverside rainforest is nowadays only just over half an hour’s drive out of Panama City – and suddenly an ideal location for creating a visitor destination. And so the Gamboa Rainforest Resort came into being.

With the mighty Chagres alongside, the Canal, Gatun Lake and the Panama Railway on the doorstep, yet surrounded by largely uncharted rainforest jungle, this place offers a fabulous opportunity to see a fantastic natural menagerie of birds, mammals and reptiles. A very civilised place to stay, deep enough into the rainforest to explore all that the jungle has to offer but without going rustic. We would also say that whoever designed the main building of the Resort should have won an award – the magnificent central atrium with its giant glazed facade looking out across the river, its restaurant with amazing views and its second restaurant at the waterside a few hundred yards away, just ooze welcome and comfort.

That second restaurant, Don Caiman, is brilliantly positioned right at the junction of river and canal – meaning that we can watch turtles and crocodiles feeding at the same moment that a giant container ship passes by just a hundred metres or so away. Not to mention the eye candy which is the railroad bridge.

We know very quickly that we are going to enjoy our stay here, and after an initial wander around the area which brings a healthy amount of early wildlife spotting, our first activity here is the “aerial tram”. The aerial tram is a kind of ski lift affair which lifts us up through the trees, up above the canopy and eventually to an observation tower with great views of the river, the canal and the forest.

There’s a rather serene feeling to drifting slowly up through the greenery and gently swaying beneath the cables, catching occasional glimpses of birds darting between perches. Serene becomes surreal at the top of the observation tower – no matter how often we see it, the sight of a towering and heavily laden container ship ambling silently past these jungle scenes still makes us rub our eyes. It really is odd.

If the aerial tram impresses, then the Gamboa Rainforest Reserve continues to do likewise. As if the location, the wildlife, the scenery and the building itself aren’t enough, the food turns out to be delicious too, and after little more than 24 hours here, this place feels like a very acceptable blend of comfort and adventure – rainforest and all that goes with it right on our very pleasant doorstep, yet a welcoming and comfortable place to stay.

There are adventures to be had here – hiking, jungle trekking, boats on the river, birds, mammals, reptiles….it’s not going to be hard to fill our days.