A former [Castillan] colony, Puerto Maltese is a nation of contrasts: the capital is a great urban scar, a veritable Latin Gotham, set against the background of lush rainforests, deep azure waters and primal volcanoes.
 
Puerto Maltese's capital is an entrepot and a key trading and market center. It is a place where goods, both legal and illegal, are stored, deposited and shipped across the continent and beyond. Foreign companies can find cheap labour in the capital region of Puerto Maltese. Manufacturing complexes that produce knock-off consumer goods of all kinds sit across from warehouses of drugs and other illegal goods.
 
The country's rapid commercial growth in the past 20 to 30 years has not been without its price. The regions around the capital are filled with pollution and waste from the industrial complexes and shanty towns. Beyond the urban blight, the lush habitat of the interior still thrives but it is only a matter of time before these havens of biodiversity are sacrificed on the altar of avarice and economic progress.
 
The capital region has a population numbering in the millions, with the one of the densest concentrations of humanity in the globe. Projections indicate that the capital region will reach the 10 million mark in the next 10-20 years.
 
Though Puerto Maltese's economy has sputtered in the past decade, the gap between the rich and the poor widens every day. The elements of greed and corruption that slowly tore away at the civil institutions are now threatening to bring down the country in a spectacular conflagaration of civil unrest and armed conflict. Political analysts are already saying that Puerto Maltese a tinder box: a series of brush-fire wars will surely follow the imminent collapse of this former bastion of freedom and democracy... A superpower could care less but one cannot forget that Puerto Maltese and its neighbours possess a vast reserve of metal, mineral and oil resources.