The Panama Canal was built by The United States from 1904 till 1914. It was the biggest government project outside the US at that time, overseen by the Department of Defense and designed by the Army Core of Engineers. It hired an international workforce for the digging, consisting mostly of men and women from Caribbean islands like Barbados and Jamaica, together with other migrant workers from Europe, Asia and Latin America.
The Panama Canal was built because, before that time, ships traveling from one side of the world to another had to circumnavigate around the globe, making international trips by boat more of a hassle. For example, going from the East to the West coast of the United States took around six months. Traveling from Europe to China took just as much.
And the Canal was made possible by the isthmus of Panama and its particular geographic shape:
It is like the tiny waist of the Americas, the thinnest part of the whole continent, therefore a place where a canal or channel could be constructed and traveled over.
When it was first built, Panama and the United States made a formal deal between its governments – a treaty – where Panama allowed the US to build and manage the Canal, providing the use of the surrounding lands for that purpose. As time went on, and as things changed around the world, the Panamanians, and the rest of the international community, felt that the US could cede or give the Canal for the Panamanians to run and take over. This happened in the year 2000.
Since then, Panama has managed the Canal quite successfully, even creating an entirely new canal parallel to the original one, to allow bigger ships called post panamax to sail through with their cargo. This was as big a project as the original canal was, and the Panamanians did it from 2007 to 2016.
Why would GLP want to tell you about the Panama Canal? Because GLP is the country’s biggest real estate developer, with almost 20 million square feet of construction in 40 years, providing homes and business spaces for many people of people through their housing complexes, apartment buildings and shopping malls. So, this is a big builder appreciating one of the biggest construction projects ever built.