The King’s Highway in Panama, by Dave Skinner
After the Spanish conquistadors plundered the Inca gold in Peru they needed to find the easiest way to transport it to mother Spain. They had not yet opened the route south around Cape Horn so they used a narrow cobblestone road built in 1530 through the jungles and across the isthmus of Panama from present-day Panama City to the Atlantic ports of Nombre de Dios and Porto Bello. With the building of the railroad, and much later the Panama Canal, the Camino Real was completely abandoned and reclaimed by the jungle. Much of this area is now part of the Chagres National Park and is an important ecosystem protecting the habitats of many rare plants – including some that grow nowhere else in the world.
One such plant is a rare and beautiful species of spiral ginger (or caña agria in Spanish speaking countries) that has the scientific name Costus vinosus. In 2008 I went to the locality where that species was first discovered along the Río Guanche to look for the plant and found that it is gone from there because the entire area has become deforested and converted to pasture land. I feared that the species had become completely extinct in the wild. Then last November I returned to the region and followed the old trail of the Camino Real along the Río Boqueron to look for this plant. I am happy to say that I found there are still a few of these plants and they are growing right alongside the old route of the Camino Real.
(There is a very good history of the Camino Real on the internet at http://www.bruceruiz.net/PanamaHistory/el_camino_real.htm .)
