To celebrate our 25 Anniversary, in our last Newsletter, we told you the story of how Raúl Arias de Para, Canopy Family’s president and founder, confronted some challenges finding the perfect place in the surroundings of the Panama Canal to start his Eco Lodge. Finally, he got the concession to reconstruct an old tower, used for the vigilance of the Panama Canal and located within Soberanía National Park, to transform it into an amazing and unique place to stay for bird and nature watching. For our third and last episode of this saga, we will continue telling you the story of some of the challenges that came after that: when the reconstruction finally started and beyond.
“The reconstruction of the tower was hard, but it was fun!”, Mr. Raúl expressed when telling this story. The first challenge came with the location of the tower itself. The Canopy Tower is located on a small hill and around 35 minutes from Panama City, which meant all construction materials had to be brought throw the hill to the tower. The second one was the architectural design itself, and the collaboration of many architects was needed to achieve the final design it has today. One of the architects came once and never came back. For example, there were no windows in the living room or any of the rooms, and a place for birding and nature watching can’t exist without very big windows. Also, the floor in the upper levels was metal, so the cement and water to mix it in order to build the floor it has today in those levels was brought also three floors up, and if you have been at the Tower, you know those stairs aren’t easy. Moreover, a big concern was a drinking water source. One day, while remodeling was happening, a person visited the tower saying he used to work at the place when it was a radar tower as a member of the Air Force and wanted to check out how the new place was going to be. Mr. Raúl took advantage of his visit and asked him where did they get the water back then. He said they had a water wheel, but they had to stop using it back then because as they were monitoring flights, which sometimes were suspected of carrying drugs, they were concerned somebody would find out about their job and poison the water! So, they had water trucks coming in to be safe. However, he showed Mr. Raúl the old wheel, and with some help, Mr. Raúl was able to put it back to work. Finally, in 1999, the Canopy Tower as an Eco Lodge opened. But not everything was easy back then and it took a while for clients to start arriving….There was no social media remember? And just when things were starting to flow and more clients were visiting the Canopy Tower, in 2001, sadly, the World Trade Center was attacked and that certainly impacted the number of visitors Canopy Family had from the US. More recently, another period of crisis was the COVID-19 pandemic, which stopped Canopy Family operations for almost two years. Luckily, thanks to our incredible customers, Canopy Family was able to recover. Nowadays, Mr. Raúl looks back at those times of crisis as incredible growing experiences, which just made Canopy Family become a stronger company with almost 80 employees now, and although, there were difficult times, it has been an amazing 25 years!