🇵🇦 Panama · Panama City and the Canal
The Amador Causeway is where Panama City breathes out toward the sea. A long, palm-lined embankment pushes into the Pacific linking four islands, and along it people walk, run, cycle, stroll with their families and stop to look at the horizon. On one side, the imposing skyline of the capital's towers; on the other, the Bridge of the Americas and the line of ships waiting their turn to enter the Canal. It's the outdoor promenade of Panama par excellence and an unmissable stop for any traveler.
What is today a handsome recreational road was born from the building of the Canal itself: the causeway was raised with the rock and earth dug out during the excavation, joining to the mainland a set of islands that had been isolated. From those industrial origins came one of the loveliest natural viewpoints in the city, now dotted with restaurants, marinas, Frank Gehry's spectacular Biomuseo and visitor centers that invite you to linger.
This guide covers the practical side of the Amador Causeway: how to get there, what to see along the walk, where to rent bikes, when to go to catch the best sunset and how to combine it with the capital's other attractions. It's one of those simple, luminous plans you can enjoy just as much by day, for the activity and the views, as by night, for the seafront terrace scene.
The Amador Causeway is bound up with the history of the Panama Canal. When the United States built the Canal, opened in 1914, one of the key questions was what to do with the enormous quantities of rock and earth excavated, above all at the Culebra Cut (later the Gaillard Cut), the hardest stretch of the work across the continental divide. Part of that material was used to raise a causeway linking the mainland with four islands sitting off the Pacific entrance to the Canal: Naos, Perico, Culebra and Flamenco. Those islands were strategically valuable for the Canal's defense, and American gun batteries and fortifications were installed on them as part of Fort Amador. For decades this whole area belonged to the Canal Zone under US control. With the Torrijos-Carter Treaties of 1977 and the handover of the Canal to Panama, completed on 31 December 1999, the Causeway and the islands passed into Panamanian hands and were converted to civilian and tourist use. Today what was a military enclave is a recreational promenade with restaurants, marinas, the Biomuseo and visitor centers, one of the best-loved public spaces in the capital. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The province of the capital and the Canal: from the first city on the American Pacific (1519) to the modern skyline of Panama City, with the Casco Viejo and Panamá Viejo — World Heritage Sites — and the Miraflores locks.
Read the history of Panamá →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before the embankment that now joins them to the mainland existed, the islands of Naos, Perico, Culebra and Flamenco were small rocky islets scattered off the Pacific entrance to what would later be the Panama Canal. Their position, right at the mouth of the Bay of Panama, gave them strategic value early on: whoever controlled those islands controlled maritime access to the city and to the future interoceanic route.
The Bay of Panama region had been, in colonial times, a nerve center of the Spanish empire in the Americas: the riches crossing the isthmus passed through old Panamá Viejo and later through Casco Viejo. The islands offshore, by contrast, stayed largely on the sidelines, natural sentinels of the Pacific. That would change completely when, in the early 20th century, the United States set about building the Canal and fortifying everything around it for its protection.
The name the area would take, 'Amador', honors Manuel Amador Guerrero, the first president of the Republic of Panama after the separation from Colombia in 1903. So the place came to be associated at once with the birth of the country and with the great Canal project that would shape its history.
The Amador Causeway is, quite literally, a child of the digging of the Panama Canal. When the United States built the interoceanic waterway - opened on 15 August 1914 - one of the great challenges was the Culebra Cut (later renamed the Gaillard Cut), the stretch where the Canal had to cross the continental divide by carving through mountain rock. From there, and from other parts of the works, came colossal volumes of earth and stone that had to be put somewhere.
Part of that material was used to raise a long embankment reaching out into the sea and connecting the mainland to the islands of Naos, Perico, Culebra and Flamenco. So what in other circumstances would have been excavation waste became something useful: a causeway linking the strategic islands to dry land. Reusing the spoil to create this connection is one of the most curious details in the origins of Amador.
The result was a long tongue of land pushing toward the Pacific, offering along the way privileged views of the Canal entrance, the bay and the growing city. But in those years the causeway was no tourist promenade; it was infrastructure serving the military defense of the Canal, inside the US-controlled Canal Zone.
For much of the 20th century, the whole area of the causeway and the islands operated as a military enclave under US control, part of the Canal Zone. On the islands and along the shore rose Fort Amador, one of the installations devoted to defending the Pacific entrance to the Canal. Coastal artillery batteries and other fortifications were set up on the islands, designed to protect the interoceanic route against possible naval attack.
The logic was clear: the Canal was a work of enormous economic and strategic value, and its Pacific entrance had to be well guarded. The islands facing the city, now linked by the causeway, were the ideal place to post those defenses. For decades, access to the area was restricted and marked by the American military presence, as happened throughout the Canal Zone.
That status as foreign military territory, physically splitting the country in two, was one of the great sources of tension between Panama and the United States across the 20th century. The Panamanian aspiration to recover sovereignty over the Canal and its surrounding areas - Amador among them - became a central axis of national political life, until diplomatic negotiations opened the way to change.
The fate of the Amador Causeway changed with the great historical turn that marked the end of the 20th century in Panama: the recovery of the Canal. The Torrijos-Carter Treaties, signed in 1977 between the Panamanian leader General Omar Torrijos and US president Jimmy Carter, set a timetable for the progressive handover of the Canal and its surrounding areas to Panamanian hands, and for the dissolution of the Canal Zone.
As that process advanced, the US military installations closed and reverted to Panama. The definitive handover of the Canal took place on 31 December 1999, and with it all the areas that for almost a century had been under foreign control passed to Panama, the Amador area with its causeway and islands included. What had been a closed military enclave was, at last, opened to the country.
From then on, Panama set about converting Amador to civilian and tourist uses. The former military grounds were gradually transformed into a recreational area: the promenade was fitted out, marinas, restaurants, shops and visitor centers were installed, and the privileged position facing the Canal and the skyline was used to create one of the most attractive public spaces in the capital. Military memory gave way to a place of gathering, exercise and enjoyment for Panamanians and visitors alike.
The most visible symbol of the new Amador is the Biomuseo, the Museum of Biodiversity, opened in 2014 on the island at the entrance to the causeway. It's the only building designed in Latin America by the Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry, one of the most celebrated figures in contemporary architecture and author of Bilbao's Guggenheim Museum. Its construction, the fruit of a long process, gave the capital an unmistakable architectural icon, with its collage of angular roofs painted in vivid colors.
Beyond its eye-catching form, the Biomuseo tells a natural history of planetary scope with Panama as its protagonist. Some three million years ago, the rise of the isthmus of Panama closed the water passage connecting the Pacific Ocean with the Atlantic. That geological event had enormous consequences: it altered ocean currents and the climate of the entire planet and, at the same time, laid a land bridge between North and South America that allowed the Great American Biotic Interchange, the migration and mixing of species that until then had evolved separately on each continent.
The museum tells that natural epic through themed galleries, animal sculptures and audiovisual displays, and devotes space too to Panama's extraordinary present-day biodiversity. So the Amador Causeway, born from the rock of the Canal and converted from military enclave to promenade, found in the Biomuseo a new purpose: reminding us that the small Panamanian isthmus not only joined two oceans by the work of man, but had already changed the world by the work of nature.