The department of Colón bears the name of the discoverer because it was here, in the bay of Trujillo, that Christopher Columbus set foot on the American mainland. On August 14, 1502, during his fourth and last voyage, the admiral landed at Punta Caxinas, very close to present-day Trujillo, after first touching the island of Guanaja. According to tradition, the first Catholic mass on the American continent was celebrated there, a milestone that Trujillo proudly claims.
Legend has it that it was upon emerging from a violent storm off the eastern cape that Columbus exclaimed 'Thank God we have come out of these depths!' —'honduras' in Spanish— giving rise, according to popular account, to the name of the country and of Cape Gracias a Dios. Whether true or not, the coast of Colón was forever linked to the first European contact with Honduras.
The department as such was created on December 19, 1881, during the reformist administration of Marco Aurelio Soto, grouping the old region of Trujillo and its Caribbean hinterland into a new administrative unit.
The city of Trujillo was founded by the Spanish in 1525 —tradition attributes its founding to Juan de Medina on May 18 of that year, on behalf of the forces of Hernán Cortés— becoming the first capital of the province of Honduras and the seat of its first bishopric. It was a key port through which silver and colonial goods were shipped to Spain and through which European merchandise entered.
Its importance also made it a constant target of English, French and Dutch pirates and corsairs, who sacked it repeatedly throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, to the point that the city came to be abandoned and refounded several times. The Fortress of Santa Bárbara, beside the sea, with its cannons trained on the bay, recalls those centuries of siege and of the defense of the Honduran Caribbean.
Today Trujillo preserves the air of a historic port frozen in time, with its horseshoe-shaped bay, its beaches and its cemetery, witness to the long and turbulent history of the Central American Caribbean.
In 1797, the Garífuna expelled by the English from the island of Saint Vincent and landed first in Roatán were moved to the continental coast of Trujillo, which thus became one of their first mainland settlements and one of the cradles of Garífuna culture in Honduras. From there they populated the shoreline westward and spread along the entire Central American Caribbean coast, as far as Belize and Nicaragua.
Trujillo also had a famous historical ending: the American filibuster William Walker, who had tried to seize Central America and even proclaimed himself president of Nicaragua, was captured by the British navy, handed over to the Honduran authorities and executed by firing squad in Trujillo on September 12, 1860. His grave is still preserved in the city's cemetery, closing one of the most turbulent pages in the history of the isthmus.
That mix of Garífuna, ladinos and historical memory makes Colón a department where the Afro-Caribbean identity coexists with the colonial heritage and with episodes that marked the entire region.
In the 20th century, the fertile valley of the Aguán River, in the interior of the department, became one of the great zones of banana and, later, African palm cultivation. The Aguán waters the valleys of Sonaguera, Tocoa, Santa Rosa de Aguán and Limón, and its flat, humid lands drew fruit companies, agro-industrial firms and thousands of peasants who arrived in waves of colonization and agrarian reform.
That wealth came at a cost: the Lower Aguán is the setting of a long and painful history of conflicts over land tenure, with clashes between peasants organized in cooperatives, palm-oil companies and landowners. Especially since 2009, the region has recorded dozens of deaths of peasant leaders and guards in one of the most serious agrarian conflicts in Central America, which has drawn the attention of international human rights bodies.
Today African palm dominates the valley's landscape, amid a permanent tug-of-war between the agro-export model and the communities' struggle for access to land.
The coast of Colón preserves some of the calmest and least crowded beaches of the Honduran Caribbean, with white sand, coconut palms, Garífuna villages and a peaceful atmosphere that sets it apart from more touristy destinations. Trujillo, with its bay and its fortresses, is the natural base for exploring the region.
Among its natural treasures are Capiro y Calentura National Park, on the mountains that overlook Trujillo, with tropical forest and lookouts toward the sea, and the Guaimoreto Lagoon Wildlife Refuge, a vast wetland of mangroves that is a haven for water birds, monkeys and manatees. Farther east, toward La Mosquitia, the department gives way to ever more remote jungles.
This combination of founding history, Garífuna culture, agrarian conflicts and Caribbean nature makes Colón one of the most singular and contrasting departments of Honduras's north coast.