Colón is a sea port city on the Caribbean Sea coast of Panama. In 2000 it had a population of about 204,000 people. It is near the Atlantic entrance to the Panama Canal. The city is the capital of Panama's Colón Province. Much of the city was burned during a Colombian civil war in 1885, and again in an accidental fire in 1915. Since the late 1960's, Colón has been in economic decline. Nowadays, the unemployment rate is around 40% and the poverty rate is even larger than that.
