The department of Atlántida, on the Caribbean Sea, is a direct child of the banana economy and one of the youngest in Honduras. It was officially created on February 24, 1902, during the government of General Terencio Sierra, out of territories that until then had belonged to the departments of Colón, Cortés and Yoro. Its name alludes to its condition as an Atlantic strip, and today it comprises eight municipalities: La Ceiba —the capital— Tela, El Porvenir, Jutiapa, La Masica, San Francisco, Esparta and Arizona.
The capital, La Ceiba, was founded as a village around 1877, during the Liberal Reform of Marco Aurelio Soto, and owes its name to an enormous ceiba tree that grew beside the old wharf and served as a reference point for sailors and traders. From a coastal hamlet it became, in barely a few decades, the third most important city in the country, after Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula, driven by the banana boom and the docks.
The territory combines two clearly distinct regions: a narrow, fertile and hot coastal plain, and the rugged Sierra Nombre de Dios, crowned by Pico Bonito. That contrast between the Caribbean Sea and the jungle mountains defines the landscape of Atlántida and explains its enormous natural wealth.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the great American fruit companies transformed this coastal strip into the center of Honduras's banana production and export. In La Ceiba the Vaccaro brothers set up shop, exporting fruit to New Orleans from 1899 and, in 1924, forming the Standard Fruit Company, one of the three giants of the Central American banana business.
In Tela, by contrast, the Tela Railroad Company was established, a subsidiary of the powerful United Fruit Company. Both companies laid railroads, built docks, camps, hospitals and entire neighborhoods, and turned the Atlántida coast into a cosmopolitan zone, populated by Honduran, Garífuna and English-speaking West Indian workers. La Ceiba came to be known as 'the sweetheart of Honduras' for its cheerful, port-town atmosphere.
With the decline of bananas after the mid-20th century —hit by blights such as sigatoka and Panama disease and by the companies' restructuring— the coastal economy diversified into African palm oil, pineapple, fishing and, above all, tourism. Even today, the old docks, the railway stations and the banana-company compounds recall that era that made Atlántida the showcase of the 'banana republic'.
The Atlántida coast is one of the great heartlands of Honduras's Garífuna culture. Descendants of Africans and Carib Indians from the island of Saint Vincent, deported by the British in 1797 and arriving first in Roatán and Trujillo, the Garífuna founded along the shoreline fishing villages that preserve their own language, their music and dance —the punta— their drums and their cuisine based on coconut, cassava and fish.
In 2001, the Garífuna language, dance and music were proclaimed by UNESCO a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. This Afro-Caribbean, indigenous and Creole mestizaje gives Atlántida an identity distinct from that of the mountainous interior: here life looks to the sea, and villages like Sambo Creek, Corozal or Nueva Armenia keep alive a tradition unique on the continent, with its cooking, its rites, its cassava bread and its hospitality.
The mix is completed by the descendants of English-speaking West Indian workers who came with the banana companies, giving the coast an Afro-Caribbean atmosphere that makes it kin to Belize, Jamaica or the Caribbean islands more than to the Andean Honduras of the interior.
If anything has given Atlántida national and international fame, it is the Great Carnival of La Ceiba, one of the liveliest in Central America. It is held in late May, within the framework of the patron-saint festival of San Isidro Labrador, the city's patron, and culminates with the parade of the 'International Carnival', when Avenida San Isidro turns into a river of floats, comparsas, batucadas and dancing that carries on until dawn.
The carnival, which in its best years has drawn hundreds of thousands of visitors, mixes the Garífuna heritage of drums and punta with the mestizo, commercial festival of the coast. During 'carnival week', the various neighborhoods organize mini-carnivals and street parties that build up to the grand final parade, making La Ceiba, for a few days, the capital of Honduran joy.
That festive spirit coexists today with a tourism that seeks in Atlántida the combination of beach, nature and Afro-Caribbean culture, and that has made La Ceiba the main gateway to the Bay Islands, to which it is connected by ferry and by air.
Atlántida is one of the most biodiverse regions in Honduras. Pico Bonito National Park, with its rainforest climbing from sea level to more than 2,400 meters, protects toucans, monkeys, jaguars, rivers and waterfalls, and is a mecca for rafting on the Cangrejal River and for hiking. Near Tela, the Lancetilla Botanical Garden —founded in 1926 by the United Fruit Company to experiment with tropical crops, under the direction of the American botanist Wilson Popenoe— is today one of the largest tropical botanical gardens in the world, with thousands of plant species from every continent.
The bay of Tela also holds Jeannette Kawas National Park (Punta Sal), a paradise of mangroves, lagoons and reefs named in honor of the environmentalist murdered in 1995 for defending it, in one of the country's most notorious ecological crimes. Off the coast, the Cayos Cochinos offer crystalline waters and protected coral reefs, part of the Mesoamerican Reef System, inhabited by Garífuna communities and with restricted access to conserve their ecosystem.
Among mountains, jungles, mangroves and reefs, Atlántida sums up in a single department the extraordinary natural diversity of the Honduran Caribbean, and has become one of the most complete ecotourism destinations in Central America.