Echoes of Intrigue in Trujillo: shaped by the whims of fortune seekers and foreign powers, this colonial city on Honduras' Caribbean coast is resisting plans for a controversial refinery.

Summary

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O. Henry once lived there

Trujillo's colorful history includes pirates, Spanish colonists, and the Garifuna, a mixture of Caribs and Africans. It is now a tourist attraction after years of isolation. Tourists are welcomed, but not a planned oil refinery that will destroy 988 acres of mangroves and bring negative change.

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Extract

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Echoes of Intrigue in Trujillo: shaped by the whims of fortune seekers and foreign powers, this colonial city on Honduras' Caribbean coast is resisting plans for a controversial refinery.

In the early morning on the slopes of Calentura, the air is heavy with the smell of red earth and tree bark and rotting leaves. Streams chuckle and whisper beneath thickets of ferns and brush. From the hillsides above drift the rasping calls of a howler monkey and the chirping of a coatimundi, climbing through the sprawling crown of a fig tree. Clouds weave damp cocoons around the gravel road and billow like cold steam across razorback ridges, before plunging down treacherous ravines to reveal, in a fleeting glimpse, what lies below: the glistening blue of the Caribbean Sea, a narrow strip of sandy beach, and nestled in the mouth of a wide and shimmering bay, the city of Trujillo, Honduras.

Site of Columbus's first continental landfall, first capital of Honduras, notorious smuggling port and burial ground of Central America's most hated soldier of fortune, Trujillo is as ephemeral as it is beautiful. Throughout its almost five-centuries-old history, the city has had its share of ups and downs. It was the ...

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