Porto Bello (Portobelo)

Porto Bello (Portobelo), home of a large Spanish fair in the New World from the late 1500s through the mid-eighteenth century. Founded as a settlement in 1510, Porto Bello is located along the northern (Caribbean) shore of modern-day Panama. It became important because of its strategic location. As the entrepôt for Spanish trade with the viceroyalty of Peru, the port also became a regular target for pirates and buccaneers.

Originally a shanty port, after 1584 Porto Bello replaced Columbus's earlier colony of Nombre de Dios as the Spanish center of trade on the isthmus. The crown had ordered the abandonment of Nombre de Dios because of its unhealthiness, poor climate, and general indefensibility. Thus, Porto Bello became the central location for trans-Atlantic trade with Peru, rivaling the great fairs of Cartagena and Veracruz. Thousands of sailors, merchants, officials, and soldiers regularly traveled through it.

After 1597, Porto Bello became the central trading post for most South American goods. There, merchandise from Spain was exchanged for Peruvian silver and other South American precious metals and raw materials. The fair was open for forty days originally but was later shortened to ten or twelve days, from a growing lack of commodities and silver. Throughout the period of the fair, mule trains trudged daily through Panama to the town, trading their goods to Spanish merchants for items from continental Europe and elsewhere. Meanwhile, the Spanish Flota, or merchant marine, came bearing goods from South America, hoping to attain a profitable exchange for them. Food and shelter were costly; the town's sanitation poor. The level of trading decreased over time until by the mid-eighteenth century the fair had become much smaller.

Throughout the period of heaviest trading, Porto Bello was a regular target for pirates and buccaneers. Although the Spanish defeated an English fleet led by Drake and Hawkins in 1595, Porto Bello fell prey to a brutal raid by Henry Morgan in 1668. Overall, however, the port was strategically located and thus fairly defensible, for which reason it generally prospered well into the eighteenth century, when the Spanish abandoned the annual flota system.

See alsoDrake, Francis; Morgan, Henry.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sir Julian S. Corbett, Drake and the Tudor Navy: With a History of the Rise of England as a Maritime Power, 2 vols. (new edition. Cranbury, NJ: Scholar's Bookshelf, 2005.

C. H. Haring, The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1910.

J. H. Parry, et al., A Short History of the West Indies, 4th ed. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987.

Additional Bibliography

Castillero Calvo, Alfredo. Arquitectúra, urbanismo y sociedad: La vivienda colonial en Panamá: historia de un sueño. República de Panamá: Fondo de Promoción Cultural Shell, 1994.

Gutiérrez, Ramón. Panamá viejo y Portobelo: La huella de la historia. Madrid: Dirección General de Relaciónes Culturales y Científicas, 2004.

McGehee, Patricia. Portobelo chronicles. Colón (Panamá): P.A. McGehee, 2005.

                                        Blake D. Patridge