“Trujillo has a great future, and it always will.” The town has always been, on paper at least, a very attractive, well-situated and strategic place. It sits in a large, deep bay; it has access to the fertile Aguán Valley and is a launching point on a natural land route leading to Olancho and Nicaragua.
It is also true that Trujillo has always been a bit out of the way, and other cities in Honduras have been stealing its spotlight. Tela was founded a year before Trujillo. Its status as the capital moved to Comayagua in 1821, soon after independence from Spain.
Trujillo is a time capsule, and that is perhaps why it is so attractive. The town has seen many booms and busts, and today it is quaint, handsome and not overbuilt — a rarity in Honduras. While nearby Tocoa and the Aguán Valley are booming, Trujillo is still a sleepy town where one can stroll safely at any time of day or night. There are no malls, no supermarkets and no Megapacas and the biggest grocery store is still located on the main square. The town’s children play in the streets, unbothered by worries. It is a place that time forgot.
TRUJILLO AND ROATAN CONNECTION
The first written accounts of the Bay Islands and Trujillo can be traced to Columbus’ third voyage. Columbus sailed from Guanaja to Punta Castilla and Trujillo in early August 1502. The great explorer described the Paya Indians, who inhabited both Guanaja and the coast near Trujillo.
Another connection comes when Trujillo was the site the Garifuna were transferred from Roatan after the British brought them there in 1797.
Also in 1860 it was the Roatanians who gave filibuster William Walker the idea to come to Honduras. Walker tried to take Trujillo and ultimately found his grave in the town’s cemetery.
Columbus was not spared the embarrassment.
PUNTA CASTILLA
Punta Castilla, or Punta Caxinas, just 21 kilometers north of Trujillo, is an extremely important place in the history of the Americas. It is the first place where Christopher Columbus set foot on the North American continent on Aug. 14, 1502. Sadly, neither Hondurans, nor Honduran authorities recognize that fact, let alone celebrate Punta Castilla’s historical importance.
There are interesting parallels with the Venezuelan communist government treatment of Columbus’ legacy in that country. The handsome bronze statue of Columbus that marked the spot where he landed for the first time in South America on August 5, 1498 is no more. Activists destroyed that Paria Peninsula statue in 2004 and all statues dedicated to Christopher Columbus in Venezuela were destroyed in 2009. Sadly Honduras is slowly following the Venezuelan revolutionary example of vandalism and self hatred.
the Spanish in 1550 is the oldest military structure build on the America’s mainland.
NOT CELEBRATING
On May 18, 2025, Trujillo should have celebrated 500 years since its founding. Still, there was very little fanfare to mark the city’s half a millennium of existence. Making it this far is quite the feat, as the city—for example—is 40 years older than St. Augustine, Florida.
Before the anniversary, many promises were made by Tegucigalpa ministers, but none were kept. Trujillo’s mayor Hector Mendoza was encouraged to leave it up to the central government. Yet, when the date of the celebrations approached, nothing was finished.
Even Christopher Columbus was not spared embarrassment. His four-foot-tall concrete and diminutive statue, located one block from the main plaza, was neither repaired nor properly disposed of. The great navigator’s “midget” bust remained missing a head and a hand. No one bothered to invest a bit of money to even rudimentarily repair the statue ahead of the town’s anniversary.
Trujillo’s central park paving wasn’t finished, and the park’s gazebo wasn’t constructed. The entrance gate to the city wasn’t built, nor was a new dock on the shore. Xiomara Castro, president of the country, failed to show up— let alone send anyone of consequence to represent the Tegucigalpa authorities. The most important officials were from the local Red Cross and the army. Ironically, perhaps, the guest of honor was Moonup Sung, ambassador of South Korea.
There was a rumor that the King of Spain might show up.
While some might see incompetence in this, others see a hint of malice and even hatred. The lack of appreciation for 500 years of Catholic sacraments, civilization, written language, law and education is beyond perplexing. Sadly, Honduran authorities promote ideologically driven hatred of Christianity, Spain, European culture, and the halfhearted celebrations in Trujillo were yet another example of that phenomenon.
According to Jon Thompson, an English amateur historian and a 30-year resident of Trujillo, at one point there was a rumor that the king of Spain might show up for the occasion. While King Felipe VI had plenty of more enjoyable activities on his calendar, he wisely stayed away from a place where his presence would not be welcome.
500 YEARS EARLIER
On May 3, 1524, the feast day of the holy Cross, Tela became Honduras’ first city. Triunfo de la Cruz, as the settlement was originally called beat Trujillo by almost exactly one year.
In 1525, after declaring his loyalty to Hernán Cortés, Francisco de las Casas decided to return to Mexico but left his deputy, Juan López de Aguirre, to establish a settlement in Honduras. De Aguirre was not happy with Puerto Cortés and traveled east to Trujillo.
Ultimately de Aguirre left the task of founding its first capital, Trujillo, to his deputy, Juan de Medina. On May 18, 1525, the settlement of Trujillo—named after a town in the province of Cáceres, Spain—was founded. Medina became Trujillo’s first mayor.
A few years later, in 1532, Trujillo obtained the status of a town, and in 1539 its church was declared a cathedral by Pope Pius II. Bishop Cristóbal de Pedraza became Honduras’ first bishop.
ROOTLESS PIRATES
In the mid-1500s, Trujillo became a gold and silver depot for mines in Honduras’ interior. There was a security problem, as the lack of sufficient population made the port an easy target for pirates attempting to enrich themselves by raiding Spanish ships and settlements.
in Trujillo in 1860.
The threat of Dutch and English pirates incentivized the Spanish to construct Trujillo’s Santa Bárbara Fort. The pirate raids in the Caribbean were part of the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648), a primarily religious conflict in Europe. The pirates often made it their life’s work to raid Catholic, be it Spanish or Portuguese, ports and destroy ships.
As part of the war against Spain, the Dutch West India Company instructed pirate Jan Janszoon to sack Trujillo and possibly intercept the Spanish silver fleet there. In July 1633, Janszoon attacked Trujillo and burned two-thirds of the houses covered by palms. The governor of Trujillo paid 20 pounds of silver as ransom for the pirates to leave.
Pirates based on Roatan raided Trujillo several times in fact, causing death, destruction, economic downturns and crisis. English pirate, William Jackson, sacked Trujillo in 1643. He arrived with 16 ships and 1,500 men and took the city without much of a fight.
In the 1600s, the nearby Bay Islands had no Spanish settlers whatsoever, and the Paya Indians living there were coerced into helping the pirates with provisions, careening their ships, and logistics. As a result, Spanish authorities made the decision to resettle the Paya Indians who lived in the Bay Islands to Trujillo and later to Río Dulce, Guatemala.
GARIFUNA AND WALKER
For Trujillo, the best part of 1700s were largely uneventful. That changed in 1797, when three ships departed the island of Saint Vincent carrying thousands of Garifuna as cargo. The Black Caribs had just lost a war with the British and were considered too rebellious to manage in the eastern Caribbean. Only half of the roughly 5,000 Garifuna survived the voyage across the Caribbean.
Trujillo found itself as a constant target of attacks.
The ships with the conquered Garifuna stopped in Jamaica and eventually arrived on Roatan to abandon the Black Caribs there. The Spanish quickly found out about the British actions, and as Roatan was not able to support such a number of new arrivals, the vast majority of the Garifuna were transported to Trujillo.
Trujillo became the epicenter for the dissemination of the Garifuna and their culture along the coasts of Central America. In the 1840s, Garifuna communities that allied themselves with Spanish loyalists, moved east and west of Trujillo. They eventually settled as far as Belize to the west and to the east in Pearl Lagoon, Nicaragua.
In 1821 Trujillo lost its status as the capital of Honduras. The capital of the newly formed republic was transferred to Comayagua, and eventually to Tegucigalpa. This date marked yet another period of decline for the town.
In 1860, Trujillo had a bout with another troublemaker, this time an American. As Great Britain was preparing to surrender the Bay Islands back to Honduras, a group of Roatanians invited buccaneer William Walker to come to the island and help them preserve their independence from Honduras.
Representing some anti-Honduran Bay Islanders, Roatan resident Uwins Elwyn traveled to New Orleans in March 1860 to look for Walker and invite him to come to the island. Elwyn essentially asked for his help in reversing the upcoming transfer of the archipelago from Great Britain to Honduras. As Walker was absent, Elwyn met with his deputy, Callender Fayssoux.
Elwyn proposed that Walker’s filibusters would travel to Roatan at their own expense, but once there, their expenses would be covered by the islanders. The subsequent plan was to help Walker with his invasion of Nicaragua
The proposal quickly materialized into concrete action. Walker sent some of his filibusters —essentially soldiers of fortune— to Roatan in June. He even stayed on the island from June 16 to 21, 1860. As the British caught wind of the possible damage his actions could cause to the U.S.-British agreement on returning the islands to Honduras, tensions rose.
As British authorities realized that the American was up to no good, Walker left Roatan for Cozumel. One way to look at it is that it was Roatanians who brought about Walker’s ultimate demise in Trujillo just a few months later.
On Aug. 5, 1860, Walker landed his ship with 91 filibusters near Trujillo and attempted to take the city. He failed and, after a chase, was eventually arrested by British navy officer Nowell Salomon.
The British surrendered Walker to Honduran authorities and he was tried by Honduran military court on charges of piracy and “filibusterism.” Walker, 36, was executed on September 12, 1860 by order of president José Santos Guardiola. William Walker, a prominent freemason, was buried in Trujillo’s Catholic cemetery.
BANANAS AND CABBAGES
When bananas became a booming industry in Central America in the 1890s, Trujillo also began to thrive. It became a refuge for American criminals fleeing justice in the North. Some were famous, others infamous.
In 1896, Trujillo hosted William Sydney Porter, known by his pen name O. Henry, when he fled justice in Texas, where he was charged with embezzlement. He was not the only American taking advantage of the lack of an extradition treaty between Honduras and the United States. His drinking companion in town was Al “Alphonso” Jennings, an Oklahoma lawyer turned train robber. They both hid in Trujillo, spending their time drinking and adventuring.
O. Henry began writing his book of short stories, “Cabbages and Kings,” while in Trujillo. His most well-known contribution to Honduras was coining the phrase “banana republic,” which is still used to describe the country and, in fact, many other countries around the world.
“It was upon this hint that the minister of war acted, executing a rare piece of drollery that so enlivened the tedium of executive session. In the constitution of this small, maritime banana republic was a forgotten section that provided for the maintenance of a navy,” O. Henry wrote in “Cabbages and Kings.”
From the 1890s onward, Trujillo was a banana town. The boom lasted about half of a century, but come to an abrupt stop. Banana operations were scaled down there in the 1930s, as United Fruit’s Castilla Division, which grew Gros Michel bananas, closed down operations due to Panama disease that decimated the region’s banana crops.
World War II came to Trujillo’s rescue when the U.S. built a small Navy base at nearby Punta Castilla. The Americans also established a seaplane base there. As the war subsided, Trujillo lingered on into the second half of the 20th century.
The 21st century for Trujillo was a roller coaster of emotions, expectations and, ultimately, disappointments. In 2001, the government approved the Honduran construction of the world’s largest vessel—a one-mile-long floating city for 90,000 residents. The 25-story-tall Freedom Ship was estimated to cost $8.5 billion. Its construction in the deep bay was expected to change Trujillo forever.
That project eventually fizzled out.
Around 2009, there were plans for Trujillo to become Honduras’ first charter city. President Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo Sosa, the country’s leader at the time and a native of Trujillo, strongly promoted the idea. However the concept of a charter city was not realized in Trujillo during the 2010s, but instead on Roatan with the implementation of Economic Development and Employment Zone (ZEDE) laws and the establishment of Próspera in the 2020s.
There were attempts to turn Trujillo into a minor cruise ship destination in the mid-2010s. The town was marketed as “Banana Coast” and promoted to cruise ships with a planned $50,000 seafront shopping center. The project ultimately faded.
In 1890s bananas became the boom industry.
Then there is the idea of building a housing community for retired Canadians looking for tranquility and warm weather. The project is called Alta Vista and is the brainchild of Randy Jorgensen, who made his fortune in the pornographic industry and promoting vice in Canada. Jorgensen has been in conflict, in and out of court, with the Garifuna, who claim that the land he acquired for his project was sold illegally.
The land owned by Canada’s so-called porn king was occupied by Garifuna activists, some armed with machetes and allegedly bused in from outside the area. The situation grows more complex from there. The Garifuna activists are affiliated with the Organización Fraternal Negra Hondureña, or OFRANEH, and are believed to be supported by more powerful interests often overlooked. OFRANEH receives funding and training from organizations such as the Open Society Foundations. Larger global players also appear to be connected to developments in the small town of Trujillo.
“Trujillo has a great future, and it always will.” That potential is different from what many people think it is or would like it to be. It is a beautiful, quiet place soaked in history and contradictions. It is a place that time almost forgot. There are certainly more booms and busts ahead for the 500-year-old city by Trujillo Bay.
