travel

Understand what this place is.

To the crassly commercial, it's just a nice place to take cruise ship tourists, and thus only needs to be maintained when the rains have stopped and the tourists are coming in droves.

But Fort San Lorenzo is one of the nation's most important parks, a place that's crucial to understand if one is to know the history of this country.

It's a place where Sir Francis Drake took a terrible beating when he tried to sail an English fleet past its guns.

It was a site of a terrible massacre during Europe's worldwide religious wars, when the Welsh privateer Henry Morgan, later to become the Right Honourable Lord Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica, took the fort from the landward side and killed all the surviving defenders because they were Catholics.

It was a place of terrible oppression, a Spanish prison in centuries when if you were apprehended in Panama and suspected of being a Jew, a Muslim, a Protestant or an adherent of West African religious traditions, you might have ended up in one of its dungeons as you awaited the boat to take you before the Inquisition in Cartagena.

It was a place where the Spanish crown jailed and executed Latin American rebels, in a vain attempt to hold onto its empire when the winds of independence were blowing over the Western Hemisphere.

So why don't the cut the grass in rainy season? Why don't they have appropriate markers to explain, for young Panamanians even more than for foreign visitors, what this place is, an what it means to Panama?

It's a matter of priorities. Let's hope these change

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