RESORTS OF OTHER SORTS.

• Author: De Cordoba, Jose
• Position: Brief Article

The Canopy Tower is not the only former U.S. government installation that has undergone a metamorphosis since the U.S. turned over the 647-square-mile Canal Zone to Panama.

Just down the road is the Gamboa Rainforest Resort, a luxury hotel that opened in June on grounds that used to house the headquarters of the old Panama Canal's Dredging Division. The $30 million, 110-room hotel, with its spectacular views of the Chagres River, is partly old and partly new. The hotel includes a row of early-twentieth century jungle-colonial wooden houses, once the homes of the high muck-a-mucks of the dredging division, which developer Herman Bern has painted in gay yellows and pinks, turning them into seventy luxury villas. Up the hill from the villas Bern has built a brand-new luxury hotel and spa, whose architecture is inspired by the late lamented Tivoli Hotel, the haunt of Teddy Roosevelt, the U.S. president who pushed through the canal.

Bern, like the Canopy Tower's Raul Arias, is also a firm believer in the idea that Panama's exuberant tropical plant and animal life can be turned into a powerful magnet drawing thousands of nature-loving, bird--watching tourists here. Aside from the usual tennis courts and swimming pool, the Gamboa Resort boasts a reptile house, a green house with some thirty-eight hundred different species of orchids, aquariums, a nearly mile-long cable-car system that threads its way through the jungle canopy, and a frog pond. Panama, he repeats like a mantra, has many more bird species than next-door Costa Rico, which has become a regional Mecca for ecotourists, who spend about $900 million a year. In the future, he says, Panama could draw more tourists than its northern neighbor.

Another convert to ecotourism is the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, the Panamanian arm of Washington's Smithsonian Institution, which is helping Bern, and other hoteliers by, among other things, training guides and helping to lay out nature paths.

"It ain't rocket science," says Ira Rubinoff, the institute's director. "Certainly people threading through paths and looking at birds are less of a problem than people cutting down forests to put in a cow pasture or a corn field."

On Panama's Atlantic side. Spain's Grupo Sol Metia hotel chain has plunked dawn $25 million to turn the installations of the infamous School of the Americas, the alma mater of a rogue's gallery of Latin American military dictators and human rights violators, into a...