At the Atlantic entrance to the Panama Canal, on Panama's Caribbean coast, the Port of Colón is the cluster of container and cargo terminals around the city of Colón. Its terminals, chiefly Manzanillo International Terminal and the port of Cristóbal, handled about 5.4 million TEU in 2024, ranking 41st in the world in Lloyd's List's One Hundred Container Ports. The port dates from 1850, when the Panama Railroad chose a marshy island in Limón Bay as its Atlantic terminus, and it matters because it sits where the canal meets the Caribbean, beside the Colón Free Trade Zone, the largest free port in the Americas, making it one of the main places where cargo for Latin America and the Caribbean changes ships. Its history runs in clear phases, each shaped by a railway, a canal, a fire or a treaty.
1850 to 1855: Aspinwall, the Railroad Town on Manzanillo Island
The port began as a railway terminus built for gold-seekers. After gold was found in California in 1848, Americans on the East Coast wanted a faster route west than the voyage round Cape Horn. William Henry Aspinwall, who held the contract for the Pacific mail steamships, became head of the new Panama Railroad Company in April 1849; it was incorporated in New York with an initial US$1 million of capital.
Starting in May 1850, the company founded its Atlantic town on 650 acres (260 ha) at the western end of Manzanillo Island, a mangrove-covered swamp in Limón Bay. Crews drained part of the island and built a causeway to the mainland, and the former island is now counted as the Manzanillo Peninsula. For years the American community called the place Aspinwall, while Panamanians, then citizens of the Republic of New Granada, called it Colón, after Christopher Columbus. The Spanish name won.
The first train ran the full width of the isthmus on 28 January 1855. The line, today 76.6 km (47.6 miles) from Colón to Balboa on the Pacific, cost US$8 million and the lives of an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 workers. It made Colón the place where passengers and freight transferred from Atlantic steamers to the trains, the job the port still does today with containers.
1881 to 1889: The French Canal and the Birth of Cristóbal
When the French canal company of Ferdinand de Lesseps began work on 1 January 1881, Colón was still just a few streets wide, surrounded by swamp. The French used soil from their excavations to build a landfill on a coral reef next to the railway's ground, and called their new district Christophe Colomb, which became Cristóbal Colón in Spanish. Next to it, the railway company's own original waterfront, known as "Old Cristóbal", is what now makes up the port of Cristóbal.
The French effort was vast and deadly. In 1888 about 40,000 people worked on it, nine in ten of them Afro-Caribbean labourers from the West Indies. The company went bankrupt in 1889 after spending a reported US$287 million; an estimated 22,000 men had died of disease and accidents. Today the majority of Colón's population is of West Indian or mixed ancestry.
1885: The Burning of Colón
In the middle of the French years the town was destroyed. In March 1885, during a Colombian civil war, the rebel leader Pedro Prestán occupied Colón and waited for a shipment of weapons aboard the Pacific Mail steamer Colon. When the company's agent, Captain John M. Dow, refused to unload them, Prestán's men seized him and other Americans as hostages. As Colombian government troops closed in, the town caught fire; each side blamed the other. Most of Colón burned for days. Sailors and marines from USS Galena landed, 600 more men arrived from USS Tennessee, and Admiral James Edward Jouett took command to protect American property. Prestán was hanged, and later absolved. Damage to American and European buildings ran into the millions, and no compensation was ever paid.
1904 to 1914: Cristóbal, the Canal's Atlantic Gateway
After Panama's US-backed separation from Colombia in 1903, the United States bought the French assets, including the Panama Railroad, for US$40 million and took formal control on 4 May 1904. The Isthmian Canal Commission set up its provisional headquarters in Cristóbal, which became the port of entry for construction equipment, most canal workers and their supplies. By April 1906 Cristóbal had 2,101 residents, 489 of them American; a year later it had passed 4,000. Housing was split by the "gold roll", mostly white American employees, and the "silver roll", mostly West Indian labourers, many of whom slept in boxcars for lack of homes.
On the Atlantic side, engineers of the Atlantic Division under Major William L. Sibert built the great breakwater at the entrance to Limón Bay and the Gatun Locks. Colón's own population rose from 3,001 in 1900 to 31,203 by 1920. The canal opened on 15 August 1914. That same year a boundary treaty made Colón an exclave of the Republic of Panama, surrounded entirely by the American-run Canal Zone.
1914 to 1947: Steamship Row, Fires and the Colón Corridor
The canal's opening brought the great piers of Cristóbal and a waterfront of shipping agencies known as Steamship Row. The Hotel Washington had gone up in 1913 on the site of an old railroad building, and between 1917 and 1938 landfill across the swamps of northern Manzanillo Island created New Cristóbal, letting Colón expand too. This was the city's most prosperous era, and the port of Cristóbal employed almost 2,000 people.
Fire struck again in 1915, and the Great Colón Fire of 13 to 14 April 1940 destroyed a third of the city. Access was a political fight: under the 1936 Hull–Alfaro Treaty the United States ceded the "Colón Corridor", a strip of Panamanian land just wide enough for a 6.4 km (4-mile) road linking the city to the rest of the country.
1948 to 1989: The Free Zone and a City in Decline
After the Second World War, President Enrique A. Jiménez revived a 1929 plan by George E. Roberts of the First National City Bank of New York, and the American trade official Thomas E. Lyons studied the site. Decree Law No. 18 of 17 June 1948 created the Colón Free Zone as an autonomous body, starting with 36 hectares on the south-eastern corner of Manzanillo Island where goods could be stored and re-exported without tariffs. It grew through land reclamation and the takeover of parts of France Field and Coco Solo to about 2.4 km² (600 acres), now the largest free port in the Americas and the second-largest in the world.
The city did not share the success. Riots in the 1960s destroyed its municipal palace, and the decline quickened under the military governments of Omar Torrijos and Manuel Noriega from 1968 to 1987. Many middle-class residents left for Panama City. On 7 September 1977 Torrijos and US President Jimmy Carter signed the treaties that would hand the canal to Panama, and former US bases on the Atlantic side, among them the Coco Solo seaplane base, began to revert.
1993 to 2016: Manzanillo, Hutchison and the Expanded Canal
The modern container port grew on those former bases. At South Coco Solo, a car storage yard in the 1980s, the American stevedore SSA Marine joined a project in August 1993 to build a transshipment terminal. Manzanillo International Terminal opened on 16 April 1995; today it has a 1,240-metre main container berth 14 metres deep and covers 520,000 m² with storage for 37,000 TEU and direct access to the Free Zone. Before the canal handover, Panama put the ports at both ends of the canal out to a 25-year contract, won by Hong Kong's Hutchison Whampoa, which took over Cristóbal on the Atlantic and Balboa on the Pacific. Panama assumed full control of the canal on 31 December 1999, and the rebuilt Panama Canal Railway reopened in 2001 to shuttle containers between the two coasts.
The canal expansion opened on 26 June 2016, adding new locks on the Atlantic side reached by a 3.2 km access channel, able to pass New Panamax ships about one and a half times the old maximum size. Container volumes at Colón rose from about 3.6 million TEU in 2015 to 5.4 million in 2024.
2025 to 2026: The Railway Sold and a Concession Annulled
The latest phase has been about ownership. On 2 April 2025 Canadian Pacific Kansas City and Mi-Jack Products sold the Panama Canal Railway to APM Terminals, part of Maersk. In March 2025 CK Hutchison, successor to Hutchison Whampoa, was reported to be selling its ports business, as US President Donald Trump denounced Chinese influence over the canal, and in July 2025 Panama's government filed two lawsuits against its local subsidiary. Then, on 29 January 2026, Panama's Supreme Court declared CK Hutchison's concession for Cristóbal and Balboa unconstitutional, after a lawsuit brought by the comptroller following an audit, and ordered the terminals to be retendered. The Panama Maritime Authority took over the two ports on 23 February 2026, and from 11 March their interim operation passed to MSC and APM Terminals, while Panama's government accused Hutchison of obstructing the transition.
Through all of it the port's logic has stayed the one Aspinwall saw in 1850: goods arriving from the Atlantic change mode or ship at the canal's Caribbean mouth. For how ships climb to Gatun Lake just inland, see our guide to the Panama Canal locks; for the American century that built Cristóbal, read about the United States and the Panama Canal; and for Colombia's rival transshipment hub to the east, turn to our portrait of the Port of Cartagena.