Panama City
Panama City is one of the few places where you can watch a cargo ship the size of a city block slide between two continents, then turn around and find a 16th-century stone archway holding itself up without a keystone. The Arco Chato in Casco Viejo has stood that way for centuries — no central support, fifteen meters of colonial masonry defying expectation — and it serves as a decent metaphor for the city itself.
The skyline is genuinely startling: the F&F Tower corkscrews 53 floors into the Pacific air, while Frank Gehry's Biomuseo splays its coloured panels near the canal entrance. Casco Viejo, the walled district rebuilt after pirates burned the original city in 1671, has its own entry on Yeppa and deserves a dedicated visit.
How Panama City came to be
Pedro Arias de Ávila founded the original settlement on 15 August 1519 — the first Spanish city on the Pacific coast of the Americas. It prospered as a transfer point for Andean gold moving toward Spain, which made it a target. On 28 January 1671, the Welsh privateer Henry Morgan led an expedition that looted and burned the city to the ground; the ruins, known as Panamá Viejo, still stand on the eastern edge of the modern city and are a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The city was rebuilt two years later, in 1673, on a more defensible peninsula eight kilometres away — the walled district now called Casco Viejo. Panama became an independent republic in 1903, and the completion of the canal in 1914 transformed it into a transit hub of global consequence. Full Panamanian sovereignty over the canal followed on 31 December 1999.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
See Panama City in motion
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Daytime temperatures sit at or just above 30°C year-round. The wet season runs May through December, bringing heavy afternoon downpours that clear quickly; dry season, January to April, offers lower humidity and easier sightseeing on foot.
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.