Darién Gap

• 1. Introduction

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  The Darién Gap is the single place where the Pan-American Highway, a road system about 30,000 kilometers long, gives out. At Yaviza, Panama, the road simply ends. It resumes at Turbo, Colombia, roughly 106 kilometers away, and nothing in between qualifies as a road, not even a primitive one.

  What fills the space is rainforest, swamp and mountain along the border between Colombia and Panama. This barrier separates North America from South America, even though it is also the only land bridge joining them. Road builders have attempted to cross it more than once, and every attempt has failed.

  What kind of land lies inside the gap, and who lives there? Why did a Scottish colony, Spanish treasure shipments across the isthmus and generations of explorers all run into it? And why do so many people now choose to walk through a place with a reputation as one of the most inhospitable on Earth?

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• 2. Mud and Mountains

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  Panama's Darién Province and the northern portion of Colombia's Chocó Department hold the Darién Gap, a region built around a large drainage basin. On the Colombian side, the Atrato River spreads into a delta that forms a flat marshland at least 80 kilometers wide. The Tanela River, which flows toward the Atrato, supplied the region's name, because 16th-century European conquistadors Hispanicized Tanela into Darién. Farther west, the Serranía del Baudó mountain range follows Colombia's Pacific coast and continues into Panama.

  Cerro Tacarcuna, at 1,845 meters, is the tallest peak on the Panamanian side. There, mountainous rainforest rises from valley floors at 60 meters, in the range called the Serranía del Darién. The contrast with the Colombian marsh could hardly be sharper.

  Darién National Park in Panama, established in 1980, covers approximately 5,790 square kilometers and is the largest national park in Central America. It includes a stretch of the Pacific coast and almost the entire border with Colombia. Los Katíos National Park is the other major protected area, on the Colombian side.

  The forests once carried extensive stands of Cedrela and mahogany. Loggers have since removed many of those trees.

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• 3. First Peoples

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  Platform mounds, plazas, paved roads and stone sculptures mark a large number of sites across the Darién Gap. Archaeologists have also found artifacts made from jade, gold and ceramic there. These remains point to communities long before any European ship arrived.

  The Guna lived in what is now northern Colombia and Panama's Darién Province when the Spanish arrived. Centuries earlier, they had come to South America as part of a Chibchan migration moving east from Central America. At the time of the conquest they lived around Urabá, near the borders of what are now Antioquia and Caldas. Conflict with the Spanish and with other indigenous groups then pushed them westward.

  The Guna explain their several migrations through conflicts with other chiefdoms. They say a move to nearby islands was meant to escape the malarial mosquitoes of the mainland. Between 1680 and 1684, a man named Lionel Wafer spent four years living among them.

  Today the Embera-Wounaan and the Guna are the main inhabitants. In 1995, a reported 8,000 people lived among five tribes. La Palma, the capital of Darién Province, is the only sizable settlement, with roughly 4,200 residents. Yaviza and El Real de Santa María, both on the Panamanian side, are other population centers.

  Small-scale farming, cattle ranching and lumber account for most of the economic activity, and the region remains largely undeveloped.

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• 4. Empires on the Isthmus

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  In 1500 and 1501, Vasco Núñez de Balboa and Alonso de Ojeda explored the coast of Colombia. They spent the most time in the Gulf of Urabá, where they made contact with the Guna. A royal decree in 1508 separated the colonial governorships of Castilla de Oro and Nueva Andalucía, and it chose the River Atrato as the boundary between them.

  Balboa heard of a "South Sea" from locals while sailing along the Caribbean coast. On the 25th of September 1513, he reached the Pacific. In 1519, the town of Panamá was founded near a small indigenous settlement on that coast. Once the Spaniards entered what is now Peru, the town became an important transshipment port and administrative center.

  Silver and gold from the viceroyalty of Peru crossed the isthmus on the Spanish Silver Train to Porto Bello. From 1707, Spanish treasure fleets carried that wealth on to Seville and Cádiz. In 1671, the Welsh pirate Henry Morgan crossed the Isthmus of Panama from the Caribbean side and destroyed the city of Panamá. The town was relocated a few kilometers west, onto a small peninsula. The ruins of Panamá Viejo are preserved, and UNESCO declared them a World Heritage Site in 1997.

  On the 14th of July 1698, five ships named Saint Andrew, Caledonia, Unicorn, Dolphin and Endeavour sailed from Leith with around 1,200 people aboard. The Kingdom of Scotland wanted to tame, occupy and administer this land. It hoped to use it as a gateway for trade between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, a role the Panama Railroad and then the Panama Canal later filled. The orders given to the fleet began with an instruction "to proceed to the Bay of Darién". After stops at Madeira and the West Indies, the ships made landfall off Darién on the 2nd of November, and the settlers christened their home "New Caledonia".

  It has been said the venture was beset by poor planning and provisioning, divided leadership and a poor choice of trade goods. Devastating epidemics struck, and some reports say the East India Company tried to frustrate the effort. The settlers also failed to anticipate how the Spanish Empire would respond militarily. After a siege and a harbor blockade by Spanish forces, the colony was abandoned in March 1700.

  The Company of Scotland was backed by approximately 20 percent of all the money circulating in Scotland, so its failure left the Scottish Lowlands in financial ruin. One argument holds that the landed aristocracy and mercantile elites, nearly bankrupted, saw their best chance of joining a major power in sharing England's overseas trade. English financial incentives are also thought to have helped persuade those in power to back the 1707 union with England.

  Most of Panama remained part of Colombia until it declared independence in 1903, with encouragement and support from the United States. The geography of Darién, through which no troops could pass, made the Departamento of Panamá harder to defend and control. The current border comes from a treaty signed in Bogotá on the 20th of August 1924 by Colombia's foreign minister, Jorge Vélez, and Panama's foreign minister. It was registered as No. 814 in the Treaty Series of the League of Nations on the 17th of August 1925, and it rests on a Colombian law of the 9th of June 1855.

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• 5. The Missing Highway

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  Planning to close the break in the road began in 1971, with funding from the United States. Work halted in 1974, after several environmentalists raised serious concerns. In 1978, the US Department of Agriculture blocked further American support. Another effort started in 1992, and by 1994 a United Nations agency reported that the road and the development that followed would cause extensive environmental damage.

  The reasons for opposition stack up. The agriculture department worried about foot-and-mouth disease. The report in 1994 cited evidence that the Darién Gap has kept diseased cattle out of Central and North America, which have not seen the disease since 1954. Environmental organizations feared deforestation. Indigenous communities feared that a road would erode their cultures by destroying their food sources.

  A river ferry between Turbo or Necoclí in Colombia and one of several sites on Panama's Caribbean coast offers an alternative. Crucero Express and Ferry Xpress bridged the gap for many years, and Crucero Express ran from 1994 to 1997. Both services were eventually suspended because they were unprofitable.

  In recent decades, engineers have studied several proposals that combine bridges and tunnels. Such a structure would allow uninterrupted transport while bypassing environmentally sensitive areas. No active plan exists to build a road through the Gap today, although people continue to discuss restoring a ferry service and building a rail link.

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• 6. Crossing the Gap

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  The Marsh Darién Expedition of 1924-25 was the first post-colonial expedition into the Darién. Its sponsors included the Smithsonian Institution, the American Museum of Natural History and the government of Panama.

  Three Brazilians made the first vehicular crossing, using two Ford Model T cars. They left Rio de Janeiro in 1928 and reached the United States in 1938. Leonidas Borges de Oliveira was an army lieutenant, Francisco Lopez da Cruz came from the air force, and Mário Fava was a young mechanic. They hoped to draw attention to the Pan-American highway, following an international conference in Chile in 1923. In Nicaragua they took what appears to be the last photograph of Augusto Sandino, who received them there. In the United States, Henry Ford and Franklin Roosevelt received them.

  A Land Rover named La Cucaracha Cariñosa, meaning The Affectionate Cockroach, and a Jeep belonged to the Trans-Darién Expedition of 1959-60. They left Chepo, Panama, on the 2nd of February 1960 and reached Quibdó, Colombia, on the 17th of June 1960. Over 136 days, they averaged only 201 meters per hour.

  In December 1960, the adventurer Danny Liska was riding a motorcycle from Alaska to Argentina. In Panama City he flew the machine ahead to Medellín, planning to cross by boat and on foot. A customs office in Punta Arenas would not clear it, and he abandoned the motorcycle.

  In 1961, three Chevrolet Corvairs and several support vehicles left Panama. After 109 days, two Corvairs reached the Colombian border. The third had been abandoned in the jungle.

  In 1972, a British Army team spent 96 days crossing the Gap in two Range Rover Classics. The crossing was part of the British Trans-Americas Expedition, led by Colonel John Blashford-Snell. Army officer Gavin Thompson oversaw the vehicles, which he drove with eight Royal Engineers. The terrain grew so difficult that a third vehicle, a Land Rover Series II, joined to help blaze the trail. The seven-month journey covered 17,084 miles from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. It was the first north-to-south crossing of the Americas on land vehicles in a single trip via the Gap.

  The British cyclist Ian Hibell made the first fully overland wheeled crossing. He rode from Cape Horn to Alaska between 1971 and 1973, and he took the direct south-to-north route, including the Atrato Swamp in Colombia. Others on similar journeys had used boats for some sections. Ed Culberson later became the first to follow the entire proposed Pan-American highway route, Darién included, on a motorcycle, a BMW R80G/S.

  Sebastian Snow crossed the Gap with Wade Davis in 1975, during his unbroken walk from Tierra del Fuego to Costa Rica. The trip appears in his 1976 book The Rucksack Man and in Davis's 1996 book One River. In 1981, George Meegan crossed on a similar journey from Tierra del Fuego to Alaska. His 1988 biography, The Longest Walk, devotes a 25-page chapter to the Gap. In 1979, the evangelist Arthur Blessitt crossed carrying a 12-foot wooden cross. Guinness World Records confirmed the trek as part of the longest round-the-world pilgrimage for Christ.

  In July 1961, three college students named Carl Adler, James Wirth and Joseph Bellina crossed from the Bay of San Miguel. They traveled by banana boat, piragua and on foot, and they ended at Mulatupu in the San Blas Islands. In 1985, Project Raleigh sponsored an expedition that also crossed coast to coast. The project had grown out of Project Drake in 1984 and became Raleigh International in 1989.

  From the early 1980s to the mid-1990s, Encounter Overland, a British adventure travel company, organized two- to three-week trekking trips from Panama to Colombia or the reverse. Travelers used whatever transport was available, including jeeps, buses and boats, and they carried their own supplies. That era ended in the 1990s, when the Colombian conflict made complete crossings much more dangerous.

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• 7. Peril in the Jungle

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  On the 6th of June 1992, Copa Airlines Flight 201, a Boeing 737 flying from Panama City to Cali, Colombia, crashed in the Darién Gap. All 47 people on board were killed.

  The Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC, led an insurgency against the Colombian government. Its rebels were present on both the Colombian and Panamanian sides of the border. The Colombian portion of the rainforest in the Katíos Park region eventually fell under the control of armed groups. Combatants even entered Panama, occupied some jungle villages, and kidnapped or killed inhabitants and travelers.

  Not every victim was political. Three New Tribes missionaries died after disappearing from the Panamanian side in 1993. In 2003, Robert Young Pelton, on assignment for National Geographic Adventure magazine, was detained for a week along with two companions, Mark Wedeven and Megan Smaker. Their captors were the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, a far-right paramilitary organization, and the incident drew wide publicity.

  In May 2013, the Swedish backpacker Jan Philip Braunisch disappeared after leaving the Colombian town of Riosucio. He had set out on foot for Panama through the Cuenca Cacarica. The FARC admitted killing him, saying they had mistaken him for a foreign spy.

  Travel within the region often relies on small boats or traditional watercraft such as pirogues. Otherwise, hiking is the only feasible option, and it is strenuous and dangerous. Venomous and deadly wildlife, tropical insects, parasites and diseases all threaten travelers. Law enforcement and medical support are nonexistent, which fuels rampant violent crime and lets otherwise minor injuries become fatal. Criminal enterprises such as human and drug trafficking are widespread.

  The danger has not kept people away. In the 2010s a very different kind of traveler began arriving in growing numbers.

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• 8. The Migrant Road

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  In 2019, there were only 24,000 crossings of the Darién Gap, but by 2022 the number had reached 250,000. In 2023, more than 520,000 people passed through, more than double the year before. Haitians made up many of the earlier migrants in the 2010s, and Venezuelans dominated in the 2020s. They were heading north toward the Mexico-United States border.

  Of the 334,000 migrants who crossed in the first eight months of 2023-60 percent were Venezuelan. That share led the Biden administration to provide foreign assistance to help Panama deport migrants. In 2024, crossings dropped to 300,000, along an organized trek of two and a half days that used to take a week.

  People from Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, the Caribbean and China have also used the route. Some fly first to Ecuador to take advantage of its liberal visa policy, then attempt the crossing on foot. In 2023, people fleeing China traveled to Ecuador and then to Necoclí in Colombia. Their numbers rose every month that year.

  The trail climbs abruptly over a mountain, and the four-day hike is a challenge even for a person in good physical shape. Women who are pregnant or carrying babies still attempt it. Rainfall causes flash floods that can carry sleepers to their deaths, and several rivers must be crossed without bridges or boats. Hikers must carry food, a tent and water purification materials. Rape and robbery are common.

  Records are not kept, but many migrants are known to die. Bodies are often found, yet authorities in Panama are said to report far fewer than the real number. In 2024, there were 55 known deaths, and probably more. That year, 180 unaccompanied minors were abandoned and looked after by child care institutions. Some had lost relatives who died or got lost, and others had traveled alone.

  By 2013, a coastal route on the east side of the isthmus had become relatively safe. Travelers took a motorboat across the Gulf of Urabá from Turbo to Capurganá, hopped the coast to Sapzurro, then hiked to La Miel, Panama. All inland routes remain highly dangerous. In June 2017, the CBS journalist Adam Yamaguchi filmed smugglers leading refugees on a nine-day journey from Colombia to Panama.

  In March 2024, Catholic bishops from bordering dioceses gathered to discuss the crisis. Panamanian Archbishop José Domingo Ulloa spoke to the pontifical charity Aid to the Church in Need. He said, "An incalculable number of people lose their lives and many of the bodies of the fallen are never retrieved." The bishops criticized traffickers who "make a living off the desperation of our brothers". They also received a message from Pope Francis describing the route as "a way of the Cross".

  Journalists have followed the migrants. In 2016, Jason Motlagh discussed his reporting on the NPR show On Point with Sacha Pfeiffer. In mid-2019, Nadja Drost and Bruno Federico spoke to Nick Schifrin for PBS NewsHour about their work, and about the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic a year later. In September 2024, Caitlin Dickerson reported on the crossing for The Atlantic.

  The Gap has reached fiction as well. In the seventh episode of Pluribus, the character Manousos attempts the crossing on foot, on a journey from Paraguay to the United States.

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