Panama City: what to see, where to stay and how to get around

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Panama was founded twice. The first city, eight kilometres east, was burned by Henry Morgan in January 1671; the survivors picked a rocky peninsula they could wall off and started again in 1673. Everything on this walk sits inside that wall. Two hours, flat, shade only in the arcades, and the stone reflects heat until about four.

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A short history of Panama City

The city was founded in 1519 by Pedro Arias Dávila, the first European city in the Americas on the Pacific coast. Peruvian gold was carried overland through it to the Caribbean coast, and from there to Spain. In 1671 the pirate Henry Morgan attacked it and the city burned, and in 1673 it was rebuilt on another site, in Casco Viejo. In 1903 Panama separated from Colombia with the support of the United States, and in 1914 the canal opened. On 31 December 1999 the canal passed to Panamanian control. The ruins of the first city, Panamá Viejo, are preserved to this day.

The ten best sights in Panama City

1
Plaza de la Independencia
Independence from Colombia was declared here on 3 November 1903. The cathedral facing it took 108 years to finish.
2
Metropolitan Cathedral
The two bell towers are faced in mother-of-pearl shell from the Pearl Islands, which is why they flash white in the afternoon sun.
3
Panama Canal Museum
Housed in the building where the French canal company had its headquarters. The best single explanation in the country of why the canal cost twenty-two thousand lives before a ship ever passed.
4
Palacio de las Garzas
The presidential palace, named for the herons that have lived in its courtyard pool since 1922. You cannot go in; you can see them through the gate.
5
Teatro Nacional
Opened 1908 with a ceiling painted by Roberto Lewis, the Panamanian who also painted the presidential palace. Closed for years, restored, and worth stepping into just for the dome.
6
Arco Chato
A flat arch in a ruined convent that stood without a keystone for three centuries. The story that it proved Panama safe for a canal is almost certainly invented; the 2003 collapse is documented.
7
Iglesia de San Jose
Holds the golden altar that survived Henry Morgan in 1671. The priests painted it black and told him it was wood, or so the story goes.
8
Convento de Santo Domingo
Burned twice, in 1737 and 1756, and never rebuilt. The roofless nave is the arch ruin itself.
9
Iglesia San Francisco de Asis
The square in front of it, Plaza Bolivar, is where Simon Bolivar called the first pan-American congress in 1826. Nobody came who mattered, and it failed.
10
Palacio Bolivar
The foreign ministry, in the Franciscan school where that 1826 congress actually sat. The chapter room is preserved exactly as it was.

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What is an audio walk?

Tours in Panama City →

A guide in your headphones: open the walk on our site, walk from stop to stop, and at each one your phone tells its story. No guide, no group, and free. This is the first walk in Panama City:

Free walking tours in Panama City

The Walled City

Plaza de la Independencia · Independence from Colombia was declared on this square on 3 November 1903, and the United States recognised the new country within three days. The canal treaty was signed fifteen days later in Washington by a Frenchman, Philippe Bunau-Varilla, who was not Panamanian and had not set foot in Panama for years. No Panamanian signed it.
Metropolitan Cathedral · Begun in 1688 and finished in 1796: a hundred and eight years. The bells were carried here from the burned city, and the two towers are faced with mother-of-pearl shell from the Pearl Islands, which is why they flash in the afternoon.
Panama Canal Museum · This building was the headquarters of the French canal company. Ferdinand de Lesseps, who had built Suez, insisted on a sea-level canal with no locks, and refused to change his mind for eight years. Twenty-two thousand workers died, mostly of yellow fever and malaria, and the company collapsed in 1889 in the largest financial scandal in French history.
Plaza Bolivar · Simon Bolivar called the first congress of the Americas here in 1826, hoping to bind the new republics into one league. Mexico sent delegates, the United States sent none in time, and the treaty was ratified by exactly one country. A century later the idea came back as the Pan-American Union.
Arco Chato · A flat arch in a roofless convent that stood with almost no rise for three centuries. The story goes that engineers cited it as proof that Panama has no earthquakes, and that this swung the canal route away from Nicaragua. It is a good story and almost certainly untrue. The arch collapsed on its own in 2003 and was rebuilt.
Plaza de Francia · The obelisk at the point of the peninsula was raised to the dead of the French attempt. The bronze plaques name de Lesseps, the engineers and Carlos Finlay, the Cuban doctor who worked out that mosquitoes carry yellow fever and was ignored for twenty years. The twenty-two thousand labourers, most of them West Indian, are counted but not named.

The Canal Itself

This is not a walk you do on foot end to end; it is four stops along the Pacific approach, done by taxi or bus with walking at each one. Allow half a day. The one thing to do before you leave: look up the transit schedule, because a lock with no ship in it is a concrete box. Ships are generally in Miraflores between nine and eleven in the morning and again from three.

Miraflores Locks · A ship is lifted here by water alone. Each chamber takes about a hundred and one thousand cubic metres of fresh rainwater, which flows in and out by gravity through culverts in the walls; there is not a single pump in the system. The water is then gone to the sea, which is why a dry year closes the canal to traffic and a drought in 2023 cut daily transits by a third.
Pedro Miguel Locks · One step of nine metres, and the gate to the Culebra Cut. This is where the mountain was: the Americans dug a hundred and fifty metres down through the continental divide, and the sides kept sliding back in. The last major slide was in 1986, seventy-two years after the canal opened.
Centennial Bridge · From the bridge you see the cut and the direction of travel, and the direction is the strange part. Because the isthmus curves, a ship going from the Atlantic to the Pacific travels south-east. The Pacific entrance of the canal lies further east than the Atlantic one, and the sun rises over the Pacific here.
Gamboa · A canal company town at the mouth of the Chagres, with 1930s wooden houses on stilts and the dredging division still working out of the same yard. The Chagres is the reason the canal exists at all: it is the only river in the region with enough flow to fill the locks, and damming it made Lake Gatun.
Lake Gatun · The lake is twenty-six metres above sea level, and ships cross it for thirty-three kilometres. When the valley flooded in 1913 it was the largest artificial lake on earth. The animals that could swim climbed the hilltops, which became islands; the biggest of them is Barro Colorado, a research station since 1923.
Amador Causeway · The causeway is made of the rock dug out of the Culebra Cut, dumped into the sea to join four islands to the shore and break the swell at the canal mouth. Stand at the end and you are looking at the queue: thirty or forty ships at anchor, waiting for a slot that cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction.

The Zone That Was Not Panama

For seventy-five years a strip sixteen kilometres wide cut this country in half, and it was United States territory: its own police, its own courts, its own schools and its own currency rules. Panamanians needed permission to live in it. This walk goes through what is left — the lawns, the grid, the barracks — and it explains more about Panama than the old town does. Three hours with one taxi leg.

Balboa · This was the administrative capital of the Canal Zone, and it still looks like a small American town because it was one. The canal ran two payrolls: the gold roll, paid in gold coin, for United States citizens, and the silver roll, paid in silver, for the West Indians who did the digging. Separate housing, separate hospitals, separate drinking fountains, separate pay for the same job.
Ancon Hill · A hundred and ninety-nine metres, and for decades the flag on top was American. On 9 January 1964 Panamanian students walked into the Zone to raise their own flag at Balboa High School. The clash that followed left about twenty-one Panamanians and four American soldiers dead over three days. The ninth of January is still a national day of mourning, and it is the reason the handover negotiations began.
El Chorrillo · A working neighbourhood built for canal labourers in wooden tenements. On 20 December 1989 the United States invaded to remove Manuel Noriega, and his headquarters stood here. The wooden blocks burned. The civilian death toll is still contested: the United States said a few hundred, Panamanian and human rights groups said many times that, and no agreed count exists.
Museo Afroantillano · A small museum in a chapel built for the West Indian workers, most of them from Barbados and Jamaica. About a hundred and fifty thousand came, more than five thousand died on the American project alone, and their descendants are a large part of the city. English is still spoken at home in parts of Rio Abajo.
Ciudad del Saber · Fort Clayton was a United States army base until the handover on 31 December 1999. Panama turned it into a campus: the same barracks now hold universities, research institutes and United Nations offices. Nothing was knocked down; the use was simply changed.
Biomuseo · Frank Gehry built one building in Latin America, and this is it. Its subject is why Panama matters beyond the canal: about three million years ago this strip of land rose from the sea, cut the Atlantic from the Pacific, redirected the Gulf Stream and let North and South American animals walk into each other territory for the first time. The canal only reopened what geology had closed.

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Getting to Panama City and getting around

Tocumen International Airport · The hub of the Americas: more nonstop destinations than any other airport in Latin America. Twenty-two kilometres from the old town, forty minutes in traffic.
Albrook Gelabert Airport · Domestic flights only, built on a former US Air Force base. This is where you fly to Guna Yala, Bocas and the Darien.
Albrook Bus Terminal · Every bus in the country leaves from here, and it is attached to a mall and a metro station. Buy a Rapipass card at the counter before anything else.
San Miguelito Metro · Line 1 opened in 2014, the first metro in Central America. Clean, air-conditioned, and the single cheapest thirty-five cents you will spend here.

Cheap eats in Panama City

Panamanian food is quieter than the food of its neighbours and it is not spicy; the chilli sits in a jar on the table and you add it yourself. The base is maize, root vegetables, culantro and coconut, and the counter where you eat it is called a fonda — a window or a stall with four stools and a handwritten board. The country uses the United States dollar, so prices here are in dollars and they are low: two to six dollars for a full plate, and a dollar or less for a fried thing eaten standing up. Breakfast is the meal to get right.

Hojaldre · Fried flat bread, the national breakfast, sixty cents and eaten with a bowl of something
Carimanola · A torpedo of mashed yuca stuffed with beef, deep fried; a dollar and the best thing on the counter
Sancocho de gallina · The national dish and the national hangover cure; hen, yam and culantro, three dollars a bowl
Ceviche at the fish market · In a plastic cup with saltine crackers, two dollars, and the corvina is the one to order
Patacones · Green plantain smashed flat and fried twice; the side dish to everything and never sweet
Raspao · Shaved ice with syrup and a spoon of condensed milk, from a cart with a hand plane; fifty cents
Chicheme · A thick cold drink of cracked maize, milk, cinnamon and vanilla; a meal in a cup
Seco Herrerano · The national spirit, distilled from sugar cane and drunk with milk; the mix is called a seco con leche
Tamal panameno · Maize dough with chicken and olives wrapped in a plantain leaf, not a corn husk; a dollar fifty
Fonda lunch counters, Calidonia · Rice, beans, a stew and a patacon for about three dollars; point at what you want, no English

Museums in Panama City

Panama has two museum subjects and both of them are enormous: the canal, and the land bridge itself. The canal museums are in the old town and at the locks, and they are honest about the cost in lives in a way the tour boats are not. The land bridge gets one building, the Biomuseo, and its argument is bigger than the canal: three million years ago this strip rose from the sea and changed the climate of the planet. Add to that the Afro-Antillean museum, which is small and is the most important room in the city.

Museo del Canal Interoceanico · In the former French company headquarters; allow two hours and take the audio guide
Biomuseo · Frank Gehry only building in Latin America; eight galleries and the one about the interchange is the point
Museo Afroantillano · Small, cheap, and the clearest account of who actually dug the canal
Museo de la Mola · The Guna textile is cut away, not sewn on; layers stacked and sliced to reveal the colour underneath
Panama Viejo museum · At the ruins, with the model of the first city; the cathedral tower is climbable from here
Museo de Arte Contemporaneo · In a Canal Zone Masonic lodge; the only serious contemporary collection in the country
Casa Gongora · About 1760, built for a pearl merchant, and the oldest house still standing in the old town; free
Teatro Nacional · Opened 1908; the dome was painted by Roberto Lewis and the building is worth entering for it alone

Nature and day trips near Panama City

This is the real reason to come, and almost nobody does it. Panama sits where two continents meet and where two oceans nearly do, and the result is a bird list of about a thousand species — more than the United States and Canada combined — in a country the size of Ireland. Inside the city limits there is primary forest with sloths in it. Twenty minutes further there is a service road that holds the world record for birds counted in a day. You do not need a tour; you need to be out by six.

Parque Natural Metropolitano · Two hundred and thirty-two hectares of forest inside the city; sloths, toucans and titi monkeys
Pipeline Road · Five hundred and twenty-five species counted here in twenty-four hours; be on it by six
Panama Rainforest Discovery Center · A tower thirty-two metres into the canopy; only the first morning group gets in and it is capped
Punta Culebra · A Smithsonian marine station with touch tanks; the two oceans meet here and do not match
Barro Colorado Island · A Smithsonian station since 1923 and the most studied tropical forest on earth; book weeks ahead
Parque Soberania · Nineteen thousand hectares along the canal; it exists to protect the water the locks drink
Camino de Cruces · The original Spanish cobbled mule road through the forest; sections of the real stones survive
Parque Municipal Summit · Planted 1923 to test tropical crops; now also a refuge for harpy eagles that cannot be released

Holy places in Panama City

Three histories meet in this country and only one of them is in the churches. The Spanish one is the silver road: Peruvian silver landed on the Pacific, crossed the isthmus on mules, and was loaded onto fleets at Portobelo, which made this the richest and most attacked piece of ground in the empire. The second is Afro-Caribbean, which arrives twice — as enslaved people who escaped into the forest and as canal workers three centuries later. The third is indigenous and still living: seven peoples, three of them with autonomous territories.

Portobelo · The fair here turned a village into the richest market on earth for forty days a year
Iglesia de San Felipe, Portobelo · Holds the Black Christ of Portobelo; tens of thousands walk here on 21 October, some on their knees
Congo dance, Portobelo · A dance and a satire kept alive by the descendants of people who escaped slavery into these forests
Iglesia de San Jose · The golden altar that survived Morgan in 1671; the baroque carving is the real thing
Fuerte San Lorenzo · On the cliff over the Chagres mouth; Morgan took it in 1670 and then walked up the river
Guna Yala · An autonomous Guna territory won in the 1925 revolt; you enter with Guna permission, not a tour firm
Comunidad Embera · Up the Chagres by dugout canoe; they were relocated when the park was declared
Puente del Rey · Built 1617, still carrying traffic, and the start of the mule road that carried the silver

Parks and gardens in Panama City

The city is built on a bay it cannot swim in and against a forest it mostly ignores, so the open space here is of two kinds: engineered waterfront, and the old Canal Zone. The waterfront is reclaimed land with bike lanes on it, and it is genuinely good in the evening. The Zone is stranger and better: lawns, parade grounds and avenues laid out by the United States Army, now parks, campuses and hills you can walk up. For a swimmable beach you cross the bridge or get on a ferry.

Cinta Costera · Reclaimed land with bike lanes and outdoor gyms; busy from five in the evening and safe
Amador Causeway · Four islands joined by rock from the Culebra Cut; hire a bike and ride it at sunset
Ancon Hill · A hundred and ninety-nine metres and forty minutes up; both oceans sides, the city and the forest
Parque Omar · The big city park, named for the general who signed the canal back; runners from five in the morning
Isla Taboga · An hour by ferry; swimmable water, almost no cars, and Gauguin lived here in 1887
Playa Veracruz · The nearest beach, twenty minutes over the bridge, dark sand; where Panamanians actually go
Playa Santa Clara · Ninety kilometres west and the drive is worth it; beach shacks that fry a whole fish for six dollars
El Valle de Anton · A town inside a six kilometre volcanic crater, cool enough for a jacket at night

Nightlife in Panama City

There are two night cities here and they do not mix. The old town is rooftops: restored buildings with bars on top, a view of the skyline across the water, and prices aimed at people staying in the boutique hotels below. Bella Vista and Calle Uruguay are the local version — converted houses from the nineteen-fifties, loud, cheap, and dead until midnight. The city is a dollar economy, so drinks cost what they cost in Miami in the old town and a quarter of that two kilometres away.

Casco Viejo rooftops · The view is the product: old town in front, glass towers across the bay, and it opens at six
Calle Uruguay · The local strip in converted 1950s houses; nothing happens before midnight and then all of it does
Via Argentina and El Cangrejo · Small bars, old cinemas and the best coffee; this is where people who live here go
Salsa and tipico · Panama is a salsa country: Ruben Blades is Panamanian and was once a presidential candidate
Seco con leche · The national drink order: cane spirit, milk and ice. Ask for it with coconut water instead
Mercado de Mariscos at night · The upstairs stalls stay open late and the beer is two dollars; the ceviche is the afternoon batch
Amador at night · Open-air places on the causeway with the ship queue lit up offshore; quieter and cheaper

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Frequently asked questions about Panama City

What is there to see in Panama City?

The top sights in Panama City are Plaza de la Independencia, Metropolitan Cathedral and Panama Canal Museum. The full list on this page has 10 sights, each with a photo and a short note.

How many days do you need in Panama City?

Three to four days are enough to see the best of Panama City without rushing, including at least one walking tour.

Is there a free walking tour in Panama City?

Yes. sleepntrip has 3 free audio walks in Panama City, with no guide and no group: your phone tells the story at every stop. The first one: The Walled City.

How do you get to Panama City and get around?

The main ways are Tocumen International Airport, Albrook Gelabert Airport and Albrook Bus Terminal. Full details are in the transport section on this page.

Where to stay in Panama City, and for how much?

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