Before opening the Canopy Tower, on January 1st, 1999, our president and founder Raúl Arias de Para was involved in many things. He was an international banker for 10 years, working in Panama, Bogotá, and Chicago. Upon his return to Panama he was active in local politics and was elected to the National Assembly for two consecutive periods. In 1984, he wrote a book about Panama’s presidential elections of that year which became the all-time bestseller in the country. After the fall of the Noriega regime in 1990, he worked for the new government, and afterward had other successful businesses of his own: a public opinion polling company, a stock brokerage firm, and a real estate development company; nothing related to birds or hospitality. However, the idea of creating an ecolodge was, somehow, always in the back of his head. One day while traveling for work, he saw a book in an airport magazine store explaining the origin of tropical fruits like mango, pineapple, etc. He bought it and he remembers thinking: One day this book will be in the library of an ecolodge I’ll build in the tropics. “It’s amazing how these ideas are in the back of your head, and you do other things until that moment comes, but everything has its moment!” Raúl says.
In our July Newsletter, you read the story of how Raúl became a birder. As you may recall, he and his wife Denise took a birding course given by the Panama Audubon Society in 1990, and some years later they attended a seminar offered by the Ecotourism Society about how to build an ecolodge. After this, Raúl felt the moment he had been waiting for, to finally open his own ecotourism business, had arrived. But where will it be built? For years, he had been captivated by the rainforests around the Canal and knew the area had a special potential for bird and nature tourism. Consequently, the journey to find the perfect place around the Panama Canal started. Little did he know that this was going to be one of the biggest challenges to the realization of his dreams.
After several weeks of exploring, he finally found what he considered to be the perfect place. It was located on Pipeline Road, the world-famous birding trail located in Gamboa, a town adjacent to the Panama Canal. However, upon further research, he found that those lands were still administrated by the U.S. Government as the Torrijos – Carter Treaty had not yet come into full effect and were, therefore, out of reach. Disappointed but determined to find the location of his dream ecolodge, he started a new search and after a couple of months found another “ideal” spot close to Gamboa and with direct views of the Panama Canal. These lands were under the control of the Panama Canal Commission, so Raúl submitted the required documentation to request their use. However, after several meetings, discussions, and efforts, the Canal Authorities denied the concession; the reasoning was that ships navigating the Canal at night might be confused by the lights of the lodge and run aground. However, at the end of this meeting, a key person to this story, Tom Duty, recommended looking into a nearby site: the Semaphore Hill Radar Station. Raúl had never heard of this location but decided to look into it anyway, thinking third time’s a charm! And indeed, it was on August 26th, 1997, that he visited the place for the first time and it was love at first sight.
But there was one last step Raúl was not expecting: the site was within Soberanía National Park and the law at the time did not permit private business within a protected area. However, as the infrastructure was already there and modifying it for an ecolodge did not involve building new infrastructure and would also promote protecting the surrounding natural resources, finally, after two long years, Raúl got the concession to use the tower as a place where nature lovers could stay at (and above) the height of the trees! “Getting the concession was hard,” Raúl says, “and then came the reconstruction of the tower, which was also hard, but it was fun!” Stay tuned to our next Newsletter to read continuing anecdotes about how the Tower became the amazing place it is today. (And yes, its library does have that book on tropical fruits!)