HISTORY
Although the Guna have lived in eastern Panama for at least two centuries, scholars fiercely debate their origins. Language similarities with people who once lived several hundred kilometers to the west would indicate that the Guna migrated eastward. However, oral tradition has it that the Guna migrated to San Blas from Colombia after the 16th century, following a series of devastating encounters with other tribes armed with poison-dart blowguns. Regardless of the Guna’s origins, scholars agree that life on the islands is relatively new. Historians at the end of the 18th century wrote that the only people who used the San Blas islands at that time were pirates, Spaniards, and the odd explorer. However, the Guna flourished on the archipelago due to the abundance of seafood. They supplemented this with food crops, including rice, yams, yucca, bananas, and pineapples, grown on the nearby mainland. Today, there are an estimated 50,000 Guna; almost 32,000 live on the district’s islands, 8000 live on tribal land along the coast, and many live outside the district. So communal is the island-dwelling Guna that they inhabit only 49 of the nearly 400 keys; the rest are mostly left to coconut trees, sea turtles, and iguanas.
