Spanish conquistadors first visited Gorgona in 1524, when it was discovered by Diego de Almagro. He named it San Felipe. Three years later, in 1527, Francisco Pizarro, during his second expedition to Peru, arrived on the island from Gallo Island, fleeing attacks by the local population. Pizarro and thirteen of his men stayed on Gorgona for seven months, awaiting supplies and preparing to continue their efforts to conquer Peru. Pizarro, who considered the island "hell," gave it the name Gorgona after losing many of his men to insect bites and the vast number of snakes inhabiting the island. The name refers to the mythical Gorgon, Medusa, who had living poisonous snakes instead of hair. Bartolomeo Ruiz was sent from Panama to rescue them. Since Ruiz’s ship was the only one at Pizarro’s disposal, they all left Gorgona to conquer Peru.

In 1679, English pirate Bartholomew Sharp captured Gorgona, naming it Captain Sharp’s Island. He stayed there for just over a month. The island served as a refuge for English privateers Woodes Rogers and William Dampier in 1709. Rich in fresh water and valuable timber, the island served as a transshipment base for ships traveling from Panama to Peru and back.

Gorgona remained mostly uninhabited until 1960. By then, island penal colonies such as Coiba in Panama, San Lucas in Costa Rica, and Islas Marías in Mexico had become fashionable. Therefore, the Colombian government decided to turn Gorgona into a prison for the country’s most dangerous inmates. Until 1984, this 26-square-kilometer island, located 55 kilometers off Colombia’s Pacific coast, was a place of incarceration for especially dangerous criminals, where political prisoners and dangerous offenders were sent to serve their sentences—sometimes for life.

Far from prying eyes, prisoners were completely at the mercy of the cruelty of both the island’s harsh guards and their fellow inmates. “Damn this place,” wrote one former prisoner in a poem. The prison was modeled after Nazi concentration camps, with many reports of human rights violations. Murders within its walls were commonplace. For twenty-five years, it was pure hell for the two and a half thousand inmates who served time there. Today, 30 years after the prison was abandoned, deadly threats still exist, but now they are protected as part of a national park.

“There are many legends surrounding Gorgona,” says Corazon de Jesus Agino, a park technician and local celebrity. “Most of them cannot be verified, but what is undeniable is that it was a place of punishment and terrible suffering.”

More than a thousand prisoners passed through the prison: murderers and rapists, as well as political prisoners involved in "La Violencia," the decade-long civil war in Colombia.

“Visitors are sometimes simply horrified,” admits De Jesus Agino, who looks after the abandoned prison buildings. Most of them were already hidden by encroaching jungle, but one remains, displaying a row of wooden bunk beds without mattresses. “Each prisoner was assigned a number,” he says. Visitors were rare, and outdoor walks were allowed only for prisoners helping to clear the forest. One place embodies the horror of the prison more than any other: the disciplinary block, where isolation cells are enclosed by heavy iron bars.

Here, the most terrible punishment was called the “tin can” — an 80-centimeter-wide pit where prisoners were forced to stand up to their necks in dirty water for entire days. “Torture, abuse, contaminated food... when I arrived, Gorgona was a hellhole,” says the last prison director, Miguel Dario Lopez.

Appointed in 1981, Lopez proudly claims to have ended the guards’ cruelty and “calmed” the prison. “The guards here were thieves, corrupt, and they took revenge on prisoners,” says Lopez, now retired.

“Ten ‘tin cans’ were still in use. I stopped all that. There was also starvation torture. Prisoners were allowed to eat only potatoes and a little rice, and sometimes a piece of barely cooked snake. They often cried; all of them had mental problems. They killed each other with homemade blades or strangled with simple rags.” In total, by his estimate, “almost 150 prisoners died on Gorgona.”

“Nutrition was improved by teaching some prisoners to catch fish. The number of visits was increased.”

“With music, painting, and even Latin, we managed to calm the prisoners and teach them to forgive,” Lopez said, showing a large scar on his palm, received while trying to stop a stabbing. “There were no more deaths with me,” he added, showing a faded photo in which he poses next to an escapee caught after three days at sea on a log raft. Most escapees were picked up by passing ships and returned to the island, but “five or six managed to escape.”

Among them was Eduardo Muneton Tamayo, nicknamed the “Colombian Papillon” — after the 1973 film starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman — who escaped in 1969 but was caught three years later. Serial killer Daniel Camargo Barbosa, known as the “Sadist of El Charquito,” escaped in 1984; authorities insisted he died at sea, but two years later he was arrested in Ecuador and confessed to killing 71 young girls there, although he is believed to have killed more than 180 people.

The prison was closed in 1984 under pressure from human rights organizations, as well as environmentalists and scientists seeking to protect the island’s natural paradise after prisoners had cut down 70 percent of its jungle. Since then, the jungle has reclaimed its lost territory.

The only way to reach Gorgona is a two-hour boat ride from the coastal town of Guapi, hidden among mangrove thickets. Gorgona is a humid mix of volcanoes and jungle, where it rains daily, and the waters teem with dolphins and whales.

Nowadays, only a few crumbling prison walls remain, and the island is better known as an ecotourism center, attracting divers and nature lovers eager to explore Colombia’s incredible biodiversity.

Given how quickly the ruins are being overtaken by vegetation, “the government will have to decide what it wants to preserve from the prison,” said one national park employee. Is it a cultural or historical heritage? Or should it disappear forever?

Sources:

https://www.euronews.com/travel/2022/01/14/gorgona-the-prison-island-with-tropical-rainforests-and-a-harrowing-past

https://www.npr.org/2019/12/08/785026958/colombias-former-prison-island-gorgona-is-open-for-tourists-and-snakes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgona_Island_(Colombia)

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Schlafs%C3%A4%C3%A4le_f%C3%BCr_die_Gefangenen_des_Gef%C3%A4ngnisses.JPG photo Tobias Balzer