We know very little about the history of our property. Panama itself is a young country, before it was Panama it was associated with present day Colombia, and very little is known about the centuries before Columbus ‘discovered’ the area.

Our hill is called Loma Vigia, or Lookout Hill. It is the highest in the area and I do wonder who was looking out for whom. Pirates planning attacks on nearby Portobelo, indigenous Indians watching the Spanish ships sailing this coast?

Much of the land toward the summit is incredibly steep, and really only the bottom third of our 20 acres/almost 7 hectares could have supported simple farming or the building of houses.

We keep coming across broken shards of pottery, lots of it, and spread over several areas, hundreds of metres apart. Some of it is quite deep, more than a foot or 30cm down into the thick red clay which lies below the rich black topsoil. Our resident person with any experience at all (aka Jim!) says the pieces haven’t been fired at a particularly high temperature. Only one piece so far shows any evidence of an inscribed design, but several hint at the original shape of the object – and some of them were huge pots. For cooking? Storing water perhaps? We don’t know yet….. another research project for our ‘spare’ time…