Ella Drua Embera Wounaan

Ella Drua (www.elladruaembera.com) is a small indigenous village located in the province of Colon. Situated by the Gatun River, it falls within the environmentally-protected Canal watershed. Since the community's founding by two families in the 1970s, Ella Drua has grown to 24 families, currently totaling about 86 members of the indigenous Embera and Wounaan ethnicities.

Although Ella Drua's families depend on subsistence farming and fishing to a certain degree, our town's economy has been increasingly based on eco-tourism for the past 10 years. Our eco-tourism business is a true community effort, and is led and managed by our women. It allows us to preserve and pass on our culture, provides our families with much-needed income, and allows us to share the beauty of the area with visitors from all over the world.

We sell hand-crafted Embera and Wounaan artisan work, play traditional music, showcase traditional dances, provide information on botanical medicine, and take our visitors on guided expeditions to visit the forest behind our homes and fish in the river.

We are currently going through the process necessary to be recognized as an official community organization in Panama. Our organization's aim is to strengthen our tourism, artisan and agriculture businesses in order to sustainably support our families.