Panama City travel guide

Top 10 sights in Panama City

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1. 

   1© Editorpana · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Panamá Viejo

   The ruins of the original Panama City, founded in 1519 as the first European settlement on the Pacific coast of the Americas and sacked by Henry Morgan in 1671. The cathedral tower, convents and street plan survive on the shore, a World Heritage site since 1997.

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2. 

   2© Jean-Philippe Boulet · CC BY 3.0

   Culebra Cut

   The thirteen-kilometre cut through the continental divide, the hardest section of the canal to dig, where the rock kept sliding back into the channel. Around 27,000 men died across the French and American efforts, most of them from malaria and yellow fever.

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3. 

   3© Katja Schulz from Washington, D. C., USA · CC BY 2.0

   Soberanía National Park

   A national park of 220 square kilometres beside the canal, twenty-five kilometres from the city, declared in 1980 and crossed by the Chagres river. Over five hundred bird species have been recorded on the Pipeline Road, which makes it one of the great birding sites of the tropics.

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4. 

   4© Editorpana · CC BY 3.0

   Metropolitan Cathedral of Panama City

   The cathedral in the Casco Viejo, designed by the military engineer Nicolás Rodríguez, begun in 1688 and consecrated in 1796 after 108 years. Its two bell towers are faced in mother-of-pearl, and the bells came from the ruined cathedral at Panamá Viejo.

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5. 

   5© Anelita Cocoa Celis · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Palacio de las Garzas

   The presidential palace of 1673 in the old town, named for the herons that walk in its courtyard, kept there since a president was given a pair in the 1920s. The building holds the president's office and residence and is closed to the public.

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6. 

   6© user:ArnoldReinhold · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Biomuseo

   A museum of Panama's natural history by Frank Gehry, opened in 2014 on the Amador causeway in slabs of coloured metal. Its subject is the closing of the isthmus about three million years ago, which split one ocean's marine life in two and let mammals cross between the continents.

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7. 

   7© Ssaucedoc · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Panama Canal Museum

   A canal museum that occupied the 1874 headquarters of the French canal company on Plaza de la Independencia until it closed in 2016 for a move. Its collection passed to the national institution; the building itself is the one Ferdinand de Lesseps worked from.

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8. 

   8© Tatiana Salazar from Panama, Panama (Flickr profile) · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Panamá City Panamá Temple

   A Latter-day Saints temple at Cárdenas outside Panama City, dedicated in August 2008, the first in the country. It has white cast-stone walls and a single spire, and only members in good standing enter past the lobby.

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9. 

   9© Gary Amberths from Panama · CC BY 2.0

   Goethals Monument

   A monument of 1928 on the Pacific side of the canal to George Goethals, the army engineer who took over the works in 1907 and finished them in 1914. Its three tiers of falling water stand for the three sets of locks.

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10. 

    10

    Parque Municipal Summit

    A botanical garden and wildlife centre outside Panama City, founded in 1923 as a US trial station for tropical crops. It now runs a breeding programme for the harpy eagle, Panama's national bird, and keeps rescued animals from the canal area.

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1. 

   1© User:Dragomiloff · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Fort Clayton

   A US Army base in the Canal Zone built in the 1920s, headquarters of army forces in Panama and later of the School of the Americas. It passed to Panama with the canal in 1999 and is now the City of Knowledge, a university and research campus.

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2. 

   2

   Fort Amador

   US Army posts on the Pacific approach to the canal, built to defend it with coastal artillery and named after Panama's first president. Since the handover the causeway to the islands has become a promenade, marina and restaurant strip.

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3. 

   3© Isaías Montilla · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Panama History Museum

   A history museum on the ground floor of the 1875 municipal palace in the Casco Viejo, covering the isthmus from the Spanish crossing to the canal handover. The independence declaration of 1903 was signed in this building.

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4. 

   4© Mónica J. Mora · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Afro-Antillean Museum of Panama

   An ethnographic museum in a former mission church, opened in 1980 on the West Indian workers who built the canal and their descendants. About 20,000 came from Barbados alone, and their families made English and Protestantism part of Panamanian life.

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5. 

   5© MACPanama · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Panama Museum of Contemporary Art

   The only contemporary art museum in Panama, opened in 1983 in Ancón in a former Canal Zone masonic lodge. It shows Panamanian and Central American artists and runs the country's main art prize.

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6. 

   6© Ayaita · CC BY 3.0

   Marine Exhibition Center of Punta Culebra

   A nature centre run by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute on a small island off the Amador causeway, at the Pacific mouth of the canal. Its touch tanks compare Pacific and Caribbean intertidal life, which on this isthmus are separated by eighty kilometres and three million years.

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