PANAMA'S RADAR FOR NATURE.

• Author: Mitchell, John (American attorney general)

A FORMER U.S. MILITARY INSTALLATION IN THE RAIN FOREST NOW SERVES AS A UNIQUE ECOLODGE AND CANOPY OBSERVATION POST

What do you do with an abandoned radar tower in the middle of the Panamanian jungle? For avid bird-watcher, businessman, and conservationist Raul Arias de Para, the answer was simple: turn it into a unique rain-forest canopy observation post and ecolodge.

"I like the forest, the wilder and more pristine the better," explains Arias. "I had a conventional dream ... an ecolodge with a stream close by, plenty of forest around it and abundant wildlife. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I'd end up in a U.S. Air Force radar tower. I had never even seen a U.S. Air Force radar tower!"

This former radar installation was handed over to Panama in 1995 under terms of treaties signed in 1977 by President Jimmy Carter and then-leader of Panama, General Omar Torrijos. The United States Air Force built the facility during the 1960s to help defend the Panama Canal. It was then used by the U.S. Federal

Aviation Administration and the Panama Canal Commission for communications and air-traffic control. In 1988 the tower became part of the Caribbean Basin Radar Network and, until it was vacated in 1995, was employed by the U.S. government to track down drug smugglers.

Today, renamed the Canopy Tower, it is a fifty-foot-high, beaming yellow and aquamarine cylinder atop Semaphore Hill, which rises nine hundred feet above Soberania National Park, a fifty-five-thousand-acre nature reserve bordering the canal. The hill gets its name from huge traffic signs, called semaphores, which were displayed here to help ships navigate the canal. Once part of the U.S.-controlled Canal Zone, the park is the most accessible wilderness reserve in Panama. Besides protecting the Panama Canal watershed, the area is home to hundreds of species of birds, mammals, and reptiles.

Arias believes that the rain forests around the Panama Canal are unique in the world. "Nowhere else on the planet can you drive over a well-paved road from a modern city to a pristine forest in less than thirty minutes!" he says. "There is also a very interesting historical side. Near my lodge is the famous Las Cruces Trail, over which thousands of mules, four hundred years ago, carried the Inca treasure across the Isthmus of Panama on their way to Spain. You can still see segments of the stone pavement. Then during the California Gold Rush, the Forty-Niners walked this same trail on their way to San Francisco from the U.S. East Coast."

Before he settled into the Canopy Tower, Arias's dream for an ecolodge in the forest took him to two other locations on government lands, but his proposals were rejected by the authorities. He was considering giving up his idea when he met an employee of the Panama Canal Commission who told him about the abandoned radar tower. He visited the derelict structure and fell in love with it: "I immediately liked the place," Arias recalls. "I did not know what I was going to do with it, but I liked it right away; it was indeed love at first...