Desperado Paradisio

During a trip to Panama, I visited the small island of Contadora. At first it just looked like many other places around the world with pristine white sand beaches, luxury homes and its share of poverty. But what intrigued me is that on its largest beach, Playa Larga, stood a completely broken down resort which seemed to have been torned apart. Not really your best tourist attraction. I got further interested when I saw that barges would moor on that beach to deliver various goods and spare parts to the island’s inhabitants. The unloading scene made me think of past slavery times. Locals raced pick-ups and mules on the beach at full speed to meet up with the barges. For a whole day they would drive back and forth to bring the goods to their different destinations. The rest of the time, the beach was left empty. It turns out the ruins once boasted a full-fledged resort, the Hotel Contadora, with a casino, restaurants, swimming pools and a convention center. Quite an offer if you consider that Contadora is just 1.39 km²... It officially closed its doors early 2009 after controversial Colombian owner Carlos Arango died in a plane crash leaving over $10 million in debt. Within 48 hours, locals had stripped the place bare, ripping walls apart to get the copper wires out and taking away anything of commercial value. The empty shell still stands today and the area is ransacked. Apart from the unloading of barges, locals still do not hang out much in the area. Isla Contadora is part of the Pearl Islands archipelago in the Gulf of Panama (around 200 islands) and lies around 50 kilometers south of Panama city. It is a fairly quiet place with some tourism activity during the dry season (january-april). It does have a very interesting history and some of it resounds in what I saw: Contadora was used as a base by the Spanish Conquistadors of the 1500s to count the pearls that were harvested from neighboring islands, hence the name of the island, which means "the one that counts" in Spanish. As the original Indian inhabitants were exterminated the Spaniards then imported slave labour from Africa in the 16th century to harvest the pearls and those descendants now live in the Archipelago. During a rebellion, several slaves manage to flee to the Darien region. Called cimarrones, they became famed looters which together with French and English pirates plundered the Spanish ships. The island was rediscovered in the late 1960s when mechanical issues forced Panamanian politician Gabriel Lewis Galindo to anchor his fishing yacht on Contadora. Its natural beauty seduced him into buying 270-acres of island and built his family mansion, where Omar Torrijos and Jimmy Carter subsequently negotiated the 1977 Panama Canal Treaties. By the 1970s and 1980s, Contadora had become a symbol of tropical luxury, attracting famous people such as John Wayne, Elisabeth Taylor, Christian Dior, Julio Iglesias and the exiled Iranian shah. The Contadora Peace Accords, which laid the foundation for peace in Central America, were negotiated in this island during the 1980s. After a more quiet period, the island came into the limelight again when the film crew for the TV show “Survivors” used Contadora as its base camp during a season.