travel

Also in this section:
One of Portobelo's other Black Christs
Christmas season in Germany
A bus ride through La Chorrera

The famous sculpture of the Black Christ is in Portobelo's Catholic church, but in that district there are several others as well. This one, to which the incongruous pelican was added later, is found at the beach on Isla Grande.

Portobelo has and long has had a black majority, mostly the Spanish-surnamed progeny of Africans who were imported as slaves in colonial times rather than of the later waves of West Indian immigrants. Panama is woefully lacking in good historical markers and the politically correct versions of what tour guides are supposed to say tends to be fairly shallow, so many visitors to the colonial era remnants of Portobelo (and Panama Viejo and Fort San Lorenzo) go away never having realized that these structures were built by black slaves.

Photo by Raymond Macht