Colón 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.

Colón is a strange town which has relished bonanzas and endured depressions throughout its history. Colón was once 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, Colón languished in an economic limbo until the last decade of the century, despite the Colón Free Zone which grew year by year and which traded $16 billion last year in imports and exports.

Colón 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 Colón into a giant transhipment center. Two new hotels have opened: Four Points by Sheraton, and Radisson. The autopista connecting Colón to Panama city has been completed. A Spanish-backed consortium wants to build a $40 billion energy hub.

The Panama International Merchandise Mart (PIMM) is currently under development near Colón Free Zone and is Latin America's first wholesale merchandise mart.

A new refinery: Panama has signed accords that will make the country home to two new oil refineries. One of the refineries is a consortium composed of US-based DuTemp, ControlSud of Luxemburg, and Ecosel of Colombia has signed a deal that creates the Panamanian company EDC. The company will invest US$6.5 billion in a plant that will produce an estimated 250,000 barrels per day (bpd) of gasoline. The project is to be located in the province of Colón.

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

Royal Caribbean Enchantment of the Seas - Royal Caribbean has announced that it will be deploying one of its modern ships by the name of Enchantment of the Seas. It is not a flag ship of the line, yet still quite a respectable cruise liner. The ship carries 2446 passengers and has a crew of 760. The itinerary of the boat will be Colombia, Aruba and Curacao with 17 such one-week cruises planned during the first season.