Unsubdued indigenous inhabitants of the region included some Maya polities, and other chiefdoms and egalitarian societies, especially in Belize, eastern Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica.
The relatively low population and strategic location attracted United States–based transportation companies to promote infrastructure projects from railroads to the Panama Canal in the zone, and conjointly with that to introduce large-scale fruit production toward the end of the 19th century, often bringing in labor from the English-speaking Caribbean to assist.
Unique elements of the region, relative to the population of Central America in general, is the high percentage of people of whole or partial African descent, and its cultural connections to English and the English-speaking Caribbean through language and religion.
[1] But, the Spanish abandoned their positions at Darien by 1520, leaving it, as well as the province of Veragua on the Caribbean coast of Panama, in the hands of the indigenous peoples.
[citation needed] The Spanish founded towns along the coast of modern-day Venezuela and Colombia, notably, Santa Marta in 1525 and Cartagena.
They were less successful on several parts of the coast, where unconquered pockets remained, notably at the Rio de la Hacha and the Gulf of Urabá.
[2] Farther south, attempts to subjugate the territory of modern-day Costa Rica were failures, although they did manage to capture slaves for labor elsewhere in the isthmus and outside it.
[3] Attempts to reduce the area through missionary activity, mostly under the guidance of the Franciscans, also failed to produce much fruit, and further hostilities in the 1760s and 1780s ended that period.
But they failed to conquer the provinces of Taguzgalpa and Tologalpa in today's northeast Honduras and western Nicaragua as well as much of the coast of Panama and Costa Rica which also lay beyond their control, save a few key towns.
[5] For much of the 16th and early 17th centuries, the Spanish were content to allow the Caribbean side of Central America remain under loose control (as around the towns of Puerto Caballo, Trujillo or Portobello).
[citation needed] By the mid-16th century, slaves working the transportation routes which carried silver from Peru to Panama and then across the isthmus to Nombre de Dios, and later Portobello, ran away and formed independent communities in the mountains north of the city.
They frequently stopped to re-supply at such places as Rio de la Hacha, Darien (which they also used as a base for raids on Panama or to cross to the Pacific) or the Miskito areas.
The Spanish Crown's restrictive trade policies, granting of monopolies to favored domestic suppliers, and inability to produce consumer goods cheaply, made smuggling a major activity for English, Dutch and French merchants.
[citation needed] In the 18th century, ships from English colonies, but particularly Jamaica and also North America, regularly visited the Miskito Kingdom and Belize.
Britain, through its positions in Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, which were more formally taken over and colonized in the second half of the 18th century, formed a military alliance with the Miskito.
[citation needed] Great Britain claimed a protectorate status over the Miskitu, aided by their relatively dense settlement in Belize.
Because of the insecure nature of the borders, Costa Rica, Panama, Nicaragua and Honduras all had to seek international adjudication to determine their Atlantic boundaries.
This identity as English speakers would be reinforced with the North American transportation and fruit producing concerns entered the region in the later 19th century.
[citation needed] Several attempts to build a Panama Canal from the Atlantic to the Pacific side of Central America failed before US interests acquired the French project and lands in 1902.
[citation needed] In the late 19th century, the Caribbean coast of Central America was a backwater, poorly developed and in many cases only partially controlled by its legal governments.
[citation needed] The California Gold Rush after 1849 created a very large demand for rapid, sea borne travel from the East Coast of the United States (as well as other parts of the world) and the Pacific, and Central America was a potentially usable route.
[citation needed] The opening up of land, and the fact that the fruit companies paid higher than average wages soon drew thousands of immigrants to the banana producing regions, from the densely settled highland settlements of the Pacific side, and from other parts of the Americas.
This combination of local cooperation and imperialist intervention led the visiting American novelist O. Henry, to declare "Anchuria" his name for Honduras, a "banana republic" in 1904.
[citation needed] In the 19th century, North American concerns began the construction of railroads in much of Central America, which necessarily started on the contested zone of the Western Caribbean.