Long before the Europeans arrived, the isthmus was home to a great diversity of Indigenous peoples organized into chiefdoms, some of them of considerable power and complexity. In the west lived the Ngäbe and the Buglé — called Guaymí by the Spanish — along with groups such as the Dorasque and the Dorace; in the east, the ancestors of the Guna, the Emberá and the Wounaan. These were societies of farmers, fishers, potters and metalworkers whose trade in gold objects reached places as distant as Chichén Itzá, in Yucatán.
The great cultural focus of the center was what is known as Gran Coclé, a tradition that flourished from roughly 1200 BC to the 16th century. At sites such as Sitio Conte and El Caño, rich burials have been found containing exquisite gold work, polychrome ceramics, pectorals and ceremonial objects that point to powerful elites and a marked social hierarchy. In 2022 and 2024, new excavations at El Caño uncovered tombs packed with gold and bearing evidence of human sacrifice, confirming the sophistication of these lordships.
These peoples were no passive backdrop to the conquest: they mounted a stubborn resistance. The name of the chief Urracá, who fought the Spanish for almost a decade in Veraguas and Chiriquí, endured as a permanent symbol of that struggle, to the point that he appears today on the national currency. The legacy of those peoples lives on in the Indigenous comarcas and in more than half a million Panamanians who identify as descendants of the original nations.
The first European to explore the coasts of the isthmus was Rodrigo de Bastidas, in 1501, followed by Christopher Columbus, who on his fourth voyage (1502) sailed along the Caribbean shore, named Portobelo and founded a short-lived settlement in Veraguas. In 1510, on the Gulf of Urabá, the Spanish established Santa María la Antigua del Darién, the first permanent European settlement on the American mainland and the first capital of Castilla del Oro, from which the penetration of the isthmus would be organized.
The most momentous event came on September 25, 1513. Vasco Núñez de Balboa, who had set out in early September with some 190 Spaniards, hundreds of Indigenous porters and war dogs, crossed the Darién jungle guided by allied chiefs such as Careta. After weeks of marching through hostile terrain he reached the crest of the range and, according to the chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, around ten in the morning he made out from the heights 'the sea of the south', before any other Christian. Days later he came down to the coast and, sword in one hand and the banner of the Virgin in the other, waded in up to his knees to take possession of the South Sea in the name of the monarchs of Castile.
That sighting — regarded by many as the most significant event after the discovery of the Americas itself — revealed that the isthmus was the shortest crossing between the two great oceans and transformed its destiny forever. Ironically, Balboa would end up beheaded in 1519 on the orders of Pedrarias Dávila, the governor who that same year founded the city of Panama and turned the isthmus into the launching platform for the conquest of the Pacific.
On August 15, 1519, governor Pedro Arias Dávila (Pedrarias Dávila) founded the city of Panama on the shore of the Pacific: it was the first Spanish city on the Pacific coast of the American continent and the base from which Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro organized the conquest of Peru. From its wharves sailed the expeditions that would bring down the Inca Empire, and through them, in the opposite direction, the fabulous wealth of the Andes would begin to flow.
Colonization advanced despite Indigenous resistance. In 1522, Gaspar de Espinosa founded Natá de los Caballeros, one of the oldest surviving colonial settlements on the American mainland, in a region fiercely defended by the chief Urracá. The native population, however, collapsed through war, slavery and above all epidemics of European diseases against which it had no defenses.
During those first decades the isthmus was administratively tied first to the audiencia of Panama and to the orbit of Peru. Its role was defined from the outset: not to be a territory of mass agricultural settlement, but a transit zone, the throat through which trade between Spain and the whole of the South American Pacific would pass. That vocation as a bridge would shape all its later history.
Through the 16th and 17th centuries the isthmus became the great transit route of the Spanish Empire. Peruvian silver arrived by sea at the city of Panama and crossed from ocean to ocean along two routes: the Camino Real, an overland mule track running straight to the Caribbean, and the Camino de Cruces, which combined an overland stretch as far as the Venta de Cruces with navigation down the Chagres River. It is estimated that between one hundred and two hundred tons of silver crossed the isthmus every year.
On the Caribbean coast the famous trade fairs were held, drawing the Tierra Firme fleet of galleons. Nombre de Dios was the port of embarkation first, compared by the chroniclers to a commercial Venice; from 1597 the fair moved to Portobelo, the bay Columbus had named. The Portobelo fairs came to last as long as forty days and, according to accounts of the time, to move colossal wealth, described as the finest fair in the world.
Such a concentration of treasure turned the coast into a magnet for Spain's enemies. To protect the flow of silver, the Crown raised imposing fortifications: the castles of Portobelo and Fort San Lorenzo, at the mouth of the Chagres River. That defensive system, a magnificent example of the military architecture of the 17th and 18th centuries, would be declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1980.
The wealth crossing the isthmus drew pirates, privateers and buccaneers from Spain's rival powers for generations. Francis Drake attacked Nombre de Dios in 1572 and, after years of raiding around the Caribbean, died of dysentery off Portobelo in 1596, buried at sea in a lead coffin. Attacks on the ports and on the mule trains loaded with silver were a constant threat to colonial trade.
The most devastating blow came at the hands of the Welsh buccaneer Henry Morgan. In 1668 he sacked Portobelo, and between December 1670 and January 1671 he mounted an even larger expedition: he sailed up the Chagres River, took Fort San Lorenzo, crossed the isthmus with some 1,400 men and on January 28, 1671, stormed the city of Panama. The city was burned and reduced to ruins; in the months that followed, some three thousand of its ten thousand inhabitants died from the sack and from disease.
The destruction forced the city to be refounded. In 1673, under governor Antonio Fernández de Córdoba, the new Panama was built some eight kilometers to the west, on a more defensible peninsula protected by walls: today's Casco Viejo, or Casco Antiguo. The ruins of the original city — Panamá Viejo — were abandoned and served for centuries as a quarry. That episode, one of the most dramatic in the history of piracy in the Americas, marked the end of an era and the decline of the trans-isthmian route in the face of the rising Cape Horn passage.
With the decline of the fairs and the diversion of trade to the Cape Horn route, the isthmus lost prominence during the 18th century and was attached in 1739 to the Viceroyalty of New Granada. When the wars of independence shook Spanish America, Panama opted for a peaceful, negotiated separation, without the bloody battles that devastated other regions.
The first step came from the interior: on November 10, 1821, the Villa de Los Santos, on the Azuero Peninsula, issued what is known as the 'First Cry of Independence', a pronouncement against the Spanish authorities led by local figures such as Rufina Alfaro in popular tradition. The movement spread through Natá, Penonomé, Las Tablas and other towns. A few weeks later, on November 28, 1821, an open town council meeting in the city of Panama, under Colonel José de Fábrega, proclaimed definitive independence from Spain.
That same day Panama decided to join Gran Colombia, presided over by Simón Bolívar, of its own accord, seeking protection against a possible Spanish return. The decision sealed the fate of the isthmus for much of the 19th century: it would be a department of the Republic of Colombia, marked by recurring autonomist tensions, several attempts at separation, and a federalism that at moments turned it into the 'Federal State of Panama'.
The geographic position of the isthmus regained global value with the California gold rush, unleashed in 1848-1849. Thousands of adventurers heading for the west coast of the United States discovered that crossing the narrow Panamanian isthmus was far quicker and safer than traveling overland across North America or sailing around the continent by Cape Horn. The isthmus filled with impatient travelers, and with them came commerce, speculation and a new wave of transit.
That flow drove the project that would reaffirm the country's interoceanic vocation. Promoted by the American businessman William H. Aspinwall, the Panama Railroad began construction in 1850 and its first complete train covered the roughly 77 kilometers between the Caribbean and the Pacific on January 28, 1855. It was the first transcontinental railroad in the world, an engineering feat that required more than three hundred bridges and culverts to cross jungles, swamps and rivers.
The human cost was enormous: yellow fever, malaria and extreme conditions claimed thousands of lives among workers brought from the West Indies, China, Ireland and other parts of the world, giving rise to the macabre legend that there was one dead man for every railroad tie. But the railroad proved beyond argument that joining the two oceans across the isthmus was possible, and it prepared the ground for the greater dream: an interoceanic canal.
The dream of the canal came true first as a catastrophe. Ferdinand de Lesseps, the Frenchman who had successfully built the Suez Canal, arrived in Panama in 1880 surrounded by worldwide prestige. His daughter turned the first symbolic spadeful of earth at the mouth of the Río Grande, and the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interocéanique began work in 1881 with the ambition of digging a sea-level canal, without locks, in barely eight years.
Tropical reality tore that optimism apart. The geology of the isthmus, with constant landslides in the Culebra Cut, proved far harder than expected. But the deadliest enemy was disease: malaria and yellow fever, whose transmission by mosquitoes was still unknown, killed some 22,000 workers during the French phase. Costs soared far beyond the estimates.
On May 15, 1889, the company was declared bankrupt, ruining some 800,000 small French investors. The financial disaster turned into a political and judicial scandal of historic proportions — the 'Panama affair' — with accusations of fraud and of bribes paid to members of parliament, and with Lesseps himself and his son Charles put on trial. A second French company tried to rescue the project and keep the concession alive, but the French canal remained one of the greatest engineering failures of the 19th century, a graveyard of machinery rusting in the jungle.
The United States revived its interest in a trans-isthmian canal at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1903 the Colombian Senate rejected the Hay-Herrán Treaty, which would have authorized Washington to build the waterway in the territory of its department of Panama. That Colombian rejection, added to the old Panamanian autonomist sentiment and to the backing of American and French interests, precipitated events.
On November 3, 1903, supported by the deterrent presence of American warships that prevented Colombian troops from landing, Panama declared itself independent from Colombia and was born as a republic. The United States recognized it on November 13, and within days France and more than a dozen other countries followed.
A few days after the separation, on November 18, 1903, the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty was signed in Washington, negotiated by Secretary of State John Hay and the French engineer Philippe Bunau-Varilla, who acted as Panama's representative without a single Panamanian signing it. The treaty granted the United States, 'in perpetuity', control of a strip of land 16 kilometers wide — the Canal Zone — in which to build, run and defend the waterway. That document, regarded by generations of Panamanians as the original sin of the republic, gave the nation the territory for its canal but sowed a century of claims over sovereignty.
The United States began work in 1904, having learned from the French mistakes. The key to success was twofold. On one side, the sanitation campaign of the physician William C. Gorgas, who, applying the recent discovery of the role of the mosquito, drained swamps, fumigated and brought yellow fever and malaria under control, saving tens of thousands of lives. On the other, the decision to abandon the sea-level canal in favor of a lock canal fed by a great artificial lake.
Under the direction first of the engineer John Stevens and then of Colonel George Washington Goethals, the Chagres River was dammed to create Gatún Lake — at the time the largest artificial lake in the world — and three sets of twin locks were built: Gatún, Pedro Miguel and Miraflores, which raise and lower ships 26 meters. The formidable Culebra Cut was excavated through the continental divide. Tens of thousands of workers arrived for the job: between 1904 and 1913 more than 56,000 people worked on it, some 31,000 of them West Indians, above all from Barbados and Jamaica, whose descendants gave rise to the country's vibrant Afro-Antillean culture.
The Panama Canal opened on August 15, 1914, with the passage of the steamship Ancón — one of the greatest engineering works in history. The waterway transformed world trade, but it also cemented an anomaly: in the heart of the young country lay the Canal Zone, an enclave governed by the United States, with its own laws, schools and police, from which Panamanians were largely excluded. That wound would shape national politics for the next six decades.
The existence of a Canal Zone under a foreign flag generated mounting tension. The demand for sovereignty erupted tragically on January 9, 1964: when a group of students from the Instituto Nacional tried to raise the Panamanian flag alongside the American one at Balboa High School, inside the Zone, the clashes that followed left some 21 or 22 people dead, among them the young Ascanio Arosemena. The date has been commemorated ever since as Martyrs' Day, and it led President Roberto Chiari to break off relations with the United States, an unprecedented step that forced Washington to renegotiate the status of the Canal.
In 1968 a military coup brought the National Guard to power, and from it emerged as the dominant figure General Omar Torrijos, a populist and nationalist leader who made recovering the Canal the banner of his government. His great diplomatic achievement came on September 7, 1977, when he signed in Washington, with President Jimmy Carter, the Torrijos-Carter Treaties, which repealed the 1903 treaty and set out the gradual transfer of the Canal to Panama, with full reversion on December 31, 1999, and a guarantee of the waterway's neutrality.
The death of Torrijos in a plane crash in 1981 — surrounded by suspicions that were never cleared up — opened a power vacuum. From 1983 the country's real strongman became General Manuel Antonio Noriega, head of the Defense Forces and a former collaborator of American intelligence, whose regime would slide into repression, electoral fraud and drug trafficking, putting Panama on a collision course with its old ally.
Noriega's regime grew steadily more authoritarian and isolated. Indicted in the United States on drug-trafficking charges, he annulled the 1989 elections — which the opposition led by Guillermo Endara had won — and set off an escalating confrontation with Washington. In the early hours of December 20, 1989, the United States launched Operation Just Cause, the invasion of Panama, with thousands of soldiers fighting in the capital and in Colón. The stated objectives were to capture Noriega and to protect American citizens and the Canal.
The invasion brought about the fall and eventual capture of Noriega — who surrendered in January 1990 after taking refuge in the Vatican nunciature and was tried and imprisoned in the United States — and the installation in power of Guillermo Endara, winner of the annulled elections. The human cost was high and remains a matter of debate: hundreds dead, both military and civilian, and the destruction of entire neighborhoods such as El Chorrillo. With it the military era ended and the restoration of civilian democracy began.
In the following decade the country peacefully reached the great milestone of its contemporary history. On December 31, 1999, in faithful fulfillment of the Torrijos-Carter Treaties, the United States handed over the Canal and the last soldier withdrew: for the first time since 1903, Panamanians took full control of their territory and of the interoceanic waterway, administered ever since by the Panama Canal Authority (ACP). The former Canal Zone was fully integrated into the country.
With the Canal in its own hands, Panama went through two decades of rapid economic growth, sustained by the interoceanic waterway, international banking, the trade of the Colón Free Zone, construction and the Tocumen air hub. The US dollar, in circulation since 1904, and favorable banking legislation turned Panama City into one of the great financial centers of Latin America, with a skyline of towers and the first metro in Central America, opened in 2014.
The defining physical achievement of the period was the expansion of the Canal. Approved by referendum in 2006 and built between 2009 and 2016, it added a third set of locks — Agua Clara on the Caribbean and Cocolí on the Pacific — capable of taking enormous neopanamax ships. Inaugurated on June 26, 2016, the project doubled the waterway's capacity and reaffirmed Panama's role in global trade, although droughts linked to climate change have put the level of Gatún Lake, and the number of transits, under strain.
Not everything was boom. In 2016 the Panama Papers scandal, a mass leak from the Mossack Fonseca law firm, exposed to the world the use of the country as a haven for opaque shell companies and damaged its financial reputation. In 2023 a huge citizens' movement against a contract with the Donoso open-pit copper mine (Cobre Panamá) paralyzed the country for weeks and secured a Supreme Court ruling that the concession was unconstitutional, in one of the largest environmental mobilizations in recent Latin American history. Between pride in its Canal, persistent inequality and the challenges of migration through the Darién, Panama faces the 21st century true to its old condition as a bridge for the world.
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The coastline and islands of Bocas del Toro were sailed by Christopher Columbus on his fourth voyage, in 1502, and many place names in the area — starting with Almirante Bay itself — are attributed to that passage. The region was home to Indigenous peoples of the western isthmus, among them the ancestors of the Ngäbe and Buglé, who still have a strong presence in the province and in the neighboring Ngäbe-Buglé comarca, where they preserve their language and traditions.
During the colonial period, isolation and hard-to-reach coasts turned the archipelago into a refuge for pirates, smugglers, castaways and free communities, far from the control of the Spanish Crown. That condition of a lightly policed Caribbean frontier, open to the English-speaking Caribbean, gave it a mixed, multicultural character from very early on and set it apart from the rest of the Spanish-speaking isthmus.
What transformed Bocas del Toro was the banana boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The United Fruit Company — the all-powerful American fruit corporation — made the province one of the great banana-producing centers of the Caribbean and set up its first head office in Bocas del Toro, on Isla Colón, where Bocas Town became a prosperous and cosmopolitan port city in the early 1900s.
Bananas were both an engine of prosperity and a source of dependence: the economy was subordinated to a single export crop and to the interests of the company. From the 1920s onward, Panama disease and sigatoka hit the plantations hard. By around 1926, United Fruit had moved much of its production to the mainland and to other crops such as cacao, leaving Isla Colón in a long decline from which only tourism, decades later, would rescue it.
Thousands of English-speaking West Indians, above all from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands, arrived to work on the banana plantations. From that encounter came the province's vibrant Afro-Antillean culture, which made Bocas del Toro an anglophone enclave in a Spanish-speaking country: to this day you can hear guari-guari, a local English creole, on the islands.
That legacy shows in the music, in dances of Afro-Antillean and Indigenous origin, in coconut-based cooking — with dishes such as rondón and rice and beans — in the Protestant churches, and in the relaxed, multicultural atmosphere that defines the character of Bocas. Although the banana crises battered the region, its cultural legacy is very much alive and is today one of its greatest attractions.
Today Bocas del Toro is one of Panama's major tourist destinations: an archipelago of islands covered in jungle and mangrove, with white-sand beaches, coral reefs and turquoise water. Isla Colón, with Bocas Town and its distinctive wooden buildings standing over the water, is the lively heart of the archipelago, with its nightlife, its hostels and its bohemian atmosphere.
Isla Bastimentos, partly protected by a marine national park, still has near-pristine beaches such as Red Frog Beach, the tiny endemic poison-dart frogs and Afro-Antillean and Indigenous communities. Nature tourism, surfing, diving and snorkeling have made Bocas a magnet for travelers from all over the world, in a province that combines extraordinary biodiversity with a Caribbean identity unlike anywhere else in the country.
The tourism boom of recent decades has brought prosperity but also strains: real-estate pressure on the islands, land speculation, growing volumes of waste and stress on the fragile reefs and mangroves. The province is trying to balance development against the conservation of ecosystems that are, to a large extent, its main capital.
Bocas del Toro also remains a farming and cattle province on its mainland side, with a Ngäbe population that works on the plantations and keeps its traditions. Between the banana legacy, Afro-Antillean culture, the Indigenous peoples and international tourism, the province holds on to a plural identity that sets it apart from the rest of Panama.
The territory of Chiriquí was home to Indigenous peoples of the western isthmus — Ngäbe, Buglé, Dorasque and Dorace — many of whom firmly resisted the conquest. Their greatest figure was the chief Urracá, who from the mountains of Veraguas and Chiriquí fought the Spanish for almost a decade in the first half of the 16th century, inflicting heavy defeats on them and becoming a national symbol of Indigenous struggle. His legacy endures in the neighboring Ngäbe-Buglé comarca and in the Indigenous communities of the province.
At the archaeological site of Barriles, near Volcán, stone sculptures, metates and statues of figures carrying others on their shoulders have been found, evidence of a complex pre-Columbian culture that lived in the fertile highlands of the province centuries before the conquest.
During the colonial period Chiriquí was a cattle-raising and farming frontier region, far from the interoceanic transit route and with close ties westward toward Costa Rica. The city of David, its capital, was founded in the 17th century and survived repeated Indigenous attacks and raids by Miskito groups backed by the British, who razed it in 1732.
As the province grew in the 19th century, David revived and established itself over time as the great urban, commercial and services center of western Panama. Today it is the country's third city and the economic hub of the whole region, the jumping-off point for the highlands and for the islands of the gulf.
In the Chiriquí highlands, in the shadow of Volcán Barú, a cool climate and volcanic soils gave rise to one of the world's great coffee traditions. Boquete — whose district was officially created in 1911 — along with Volcán, Cerro Punta and Guadalupe became centers of high-altitude coffee production. This is where the Geisha variety is grown, originally from Ethiopia and acclimatized in Panama, which has broken world price records at auction and given international fame to the Chiriquí coffee circuit.
Through the 19th and 20th centuries the region received European and North American immigrants, as well as Ngäbe communities that come down each season to work the coffee harvest. Today Boquete is also a magnet for foreign retirees, drawn by its spring-like climate, its gardens, its hot springs and its quiet atmosphere, and every January it holds its famous Flower and Coffee Fair.
Chiriquí holds some of Panama's greatest natural treasures. Volcán Barú, at 3,475 meters, is the highest point in the country: from its summit, on exceptionally clear days, you can see the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea at the same time, a sight many people climb through the night to catch at dawn.
In the heights along the Costa Rican border, La Amistad International Park — a World Heritage Site and a binational reserve within the Talamanca range — protects a vast cloud forest of extraordinary biodiversity, home to the resplendent quetzal. The celebrated Los Quetzales Trail links Boquete and Cerro Punta across this paradise of birds and mist, one of the country's great destinations for hiking and wildlife watching.
On the Pacific side, the Gulf of Chiriquí Marine National Park shelters dozens of islands, reefs and mangroves, with destinations such as Isla Boca Brava, a base for exploring waters rich in marine life, watching whales in season and enjoying empty beaches. Farther west, the broad beaches of Las Lajas offer kilometers of sand open to the ocean.
Mountains, cloud forest, coffee and sea make Chiriquí one of the most varied provinces in Panama, able to offer highland cold and coastal tropical heat on the same day. Its strong regional identity, its folklore — with the Chiriquí drum — and its economic vitality make it one of the most dynamic poles of the country's interior.
The territory of Coclé was one of the great centers of the pre-Columbian cultures of the isthmus, the heart of what is known as Gran Coclé, a cultural tradition that flourished for more than two millennia up to the 16th century. At archaeological sites such as Sitio Conte and El Caño, rich burials have been found with exquisite gold work, pectorals, polychrome ceramics and ceremonial objects that reveal powerful chiefdoms and a marked social hierarchy.
Sitio Conte was excavated in the 1930s and 1940s by archaeologists from Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, who brought to light elite tombs with spectacular grave goods. At El Caño, today an archaeological park, excavations led by the Panamanian archaeologist Julia Mayo uncovered in 2022 and 2024 tombs packed with gold and bearing evidence of human sacrifice, confirming the power of those elites and renewing worldwide interest in Coclé goldwork.
The Spanish presence reached Coclé early: on May 20, 1522, in the time of Pedrarias Dávila, Natá de los Caballeros was founded, one of the oldest surviving colonial settlements on the American mainland. It was founded in a region that the Indigenous peoples defended firmly under the leadership of the chief Urracá, whose long war against the Spanish made him a national symbol of resistance.
The church of Natá, dedicated to Saint James the Apostle, is one of the oldest colonial churches still standing on the continent and holds remarkable carvings and altarpieces. The town, with its colonial layout and its tile-roofed houses, keeps the air of the old Spanish villa and is a living testimony to the first centuries of colonization on the isthmus.
The provincial capital, Penonomé, has a long history: according to tradition it briefly served as the capital of the isthmus during the colonial period, in the years following the destruction of the city of Panama by the pirate Henry Morgan in 1671. Set in the heart of the country, the city established itself as the agricultural, commercial and administrative center of the interior.
Coclé forms part of the so-called Arco Seco, the drier belt of the central Pacific, historically given over to sugarcane, cattle, rice growing and salt production. Its carnival, its traditional raft parades on the Zaratí River and its country festivals make it one of the provinces with the most pronounced interior identity, strongly attached to tradition and folklore.
The great tourist destination of Coclé is El Valle de Antón, a mountain town set inside the crater of an ancient dormant volcano, considered one of the largest inhabited craters in the world. At around 600 meters of altitude it enjoys a cool, spring-like climate all year, which made it a summer retreat as far back as colonial times.
Ringed by hills such as the Gaital and the silhouette of the India Dormida, it offers trails, waterfalls, hot springs, a colorful crafts market and the famous endemic golden frogs, a national symbol of Panama and today critically endangered. Its combination of nature, pleasant climate and closeness to the capital has made it one of the best-loved places among Panamanians and visitors alike.
Toward the mountains, in the heights of Omar Torrijos National Park (El Copé), a cloud forest of great biodiversity survives, where the Atlantic and Pacific forests meet and where it is possible to see quetzals and an astonishing variety of birds and amphibians. It is a hiking and wildlife-watching destination that is still far from crowded.
On the Pacific coast, the area of Farallón, Playa Blanca and Santa Clara concentrates some of the most popular beaches and resorts in the country, a little over two hours from the capital and heirs to the former Río Hato military base. Between the crater of El Valle, the mountains of El Copé and the sandy beaches, Coclé condenses much of the landscape diversity of central Panama.
The Caribbean coast of what is now Colón province was, through the 16th and 17th centuries, one of the nerve centers of the Spanish Empire in the Americas. At Portobelo — whose bay Columbus had named in 1502 — the famous trade fairs were held from 1597, drawing the Tierra Firme fleet: there the Peruvian silver that had crossed the isthmus along the Camino Real and the Camino de Cruces was loaded, and European goods destined for the whole of South America were unloaded.
The Portobelo fairs came to last as long as forty days and to move wealth that the chroniclers described as the greatest in the world. Before Portobelo, that role had been played by Nombre de Dios, compared at its height to a commercial Venice. That constant movement of treasure made the Panamanian Caribbean a coveted prize for Spain's rival powers.
To protect that treasure, powerful fortifications were built: the castles of Portobelo, guarding the bay, and the Castillo de San Lorenzo el Real, at the mouth of the Chagres River, up which boats traveled toward the interior. That defensive complex is a magnificent example of Spanish military architecture of the 17th and 18th centuries and was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1980.
The wealth also attracted famous attacks. Francis Drake died off Portobelo in 1596; and the buccaneer Henry Morgan sacked the port in 1668 and sailed up the Chagres, taking San Lorenzo on his way to the destruction of the city of Panama in 1671. The walls, cannon and vaults still standing today are witnesses to an age when the fate of empires was played out on these shores.
The city of Colón was born around 1850 at the Caribbean end of the future Canal, as the Atlantic terminal of the Panama Railroad then being built to carry California gold seekers from one ocean to the other. Founded by Americans, it was for a time called Aspinwall, in honor of one of the railroad's promoters, before the name Colón prevailed.
With the building of the Canal in the early 20th century, the city became a strategic port and point of entry, populated in large part by West Indian workers. Today Colón is home to the Colón Free Zone — one of the largest free-trade zones in the world — and to enormous container ports at the Atlantic mouth of the Canal. Despite that colossal economic activity, the city has carried problems of poverty and urban decay for decades, in a painful contrast with the wealth moving through the interoceanic waterway at its feet.
Colón province is one of the great hearts of Afro-descendant culture in Panama. In Portobelo and along the Costa Arriba, congo culture survives, inherited from the cimarrones — enslaved people who fled their masters and formed free communities, the so-called palenques, during the colonial period. Its expression combines dance, drums, an inverted ritual language, patchwork costumes and the mocking figure of the devil, in a performance that satirizes and defies colonial power.
These ritual and festive expressions of congo culture have been recognized by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The congo drums, songs and dances are one of the most alive and singular legacies of the African diaspora in the Americas, and they come out above all during the carnivals and festivals of the Costa Arriba of Colón.
Every October 21, Portobelo fills with pilgrims who come to venerate the Black Christ, the Nazarene of Portobelo, a 17th-century image regarded as miraculous and the patron of the town. Thousands of devotees arrive on foot, many dressed in purple and some crawling on their knees, in one of the largest and most intense expressions of popular devotion in the country.
Around it, Portobelo National Park and the San Lorenzo forest protect reefs, mangroves and tropical woodland that make the province a destination for history and nature at once. Isla Grande, on the Costa Arriba, is a popular Afro-Caribbean beach retreat, and the waters of the Colón Caribbean offer diving among corals and wrecks. Colonial history, African culture and nature live side by side in one of the most distinctive provinces of Panama.
The Darién was the setting for the first steps of the Spanish conquest on the mainland. In 1510, in the region of the Gulf of Urabá, Santa María la Antigua del Darién was founded, the first permanent European settlement on the American mainland and the first capital of Castilla del Oro. The Spanish built it after defeating the chief Cémaco and dedicated the site to the Virgin of La Antigua of Seville, whose name they gave it.
It was from this region that Vasco Núñez de Balboa set out in 1513 to cross the jungle and become the first European to sight the Pacific Ocean. Santa María was abandoned around 1524, when the capital moved to the newly founded city of Panama, and shortly afterward it was destroyed by Indigenous forces. That first chapter placed the Darién at the very origins of the European presence on the continent.
The Darién was a territory of stubborn Indigenous resistance and a refuge for maroons and free communities. Today it is the great homeland of the Emberá and Wounaan peoples — who have their own comarca here — along with Guna communities and Afro-Darienite communities descended from enslaved people. Its inhabitants live along the great rivers, in villages linked by dugout canoe, in one of the most remote settings in the Americas.
The Darién was also the scene of one of the strangest episodes in colonial history: between 1698 and 1700, Scotland tried to found the colony of New Caledonia here, an ambitious commercial venture that failed completely amid disease, hunger and hostility, ruining much of the country and helping to push Scotland toward union with England in 1707.
The Darién is famous across the continent for a blank space on the map: the Darién Gap, the only stretch where the Pan-American Highway, which in theory runs from Alaska to Patagonia, is interrupted. The road ends at the village of Yaviza, and from there on there is only jungle, rivers and mangrove, with no route through to Colombia, across a gap of about a hundred kilometers.
That isolation — maintained in part to protect the forest and to block the spread of livestock diseases, smuggling and trafficking — has made the Darién one of the least accessible and most mythologized regions in the Americas. In recent decades it has also become a dangerous transit route for hundreds of thousands of migrants attempting to cross the jungle on foot heading north, in one of the largest migration crises on the continent.
The natural heart of the province is Darién National Park, the largest protected area in Panama and one of the largest in Central America, declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1981 and a Biosphere Reserve. It protects lowland and montane rainforest, rivers, mangroves and coastline of enormous biodiversity: jaguars, tapirs, the harpy eagle — the national bird — and hundreds of bird species.
It is one of the last great wildlife refuges on the continent and also works as a natural barrier that has protected Central America from pests and diseases. Given its remoteness, it can only be visited on organized expeditions. Private reserves such as Punta Patiño, on the Gulf of San Miguel, make it possible to get close to this extreme nature and to the culture of the Indigenous peoples of the Darién.
The Darién is today a frontier in every sense: geographic, between Panama and Colombia; ecological, between two great continental biomes; and human, with Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant communities, settlers and migrants in transit all sharing the same space. It is the least populated province and one of the poorest in the country, but also the one with the most intact natural environment.
Its future is caught between the pressure of deforestation, cattle ranching and drug trafficking on one side, and conservation and sustainable tourism efforts on the other. For the traveler, the Darién represents Panama's last great frontier: a world of jungle, rivers and ancestral cultures that resists modernity and keeps the aura of the unexplored.
The Emberá-Wounaan comarca is the territory of two Indigenous peoples of the Darién jungle: the Emberá and the Wounaan, related to communities of the neighboring Colombian Chocó, from where they migrated into eastern Panama over the centuries. They traditionally live along the great rivers, in villages of wooden houses with palm-thatch roofs built on stilts, in close relationship with the forest.
They are peoples renowned for their craftwork: fine basketry made from natural fibers — considered among the best in the world — carvings in palo sangre wood and in tagua nut (vegetable ivory), and body painting with jagua, a blue-black dye with which they cover the skin in intricate designs. Their culture, their music, their shamanism and their knowledge of the forest are deeply bound to the Darién environment.
Although they share territory and many cultural traits, the Emberá and the Wounaan are two distinct peoples with different languages. The Emberá are the larger group; the Wounaan, fewer in number, keep a language and traditions of their own and are especially recognized for their extremely fine baskets and carvings. Both live scattered along the rivers of the Darién and in some areas near the Canal.
This coexistence of two nations within a single comarca reflects the complexity of Panama's Indigenous mosaic. Their congresses and traditional authorities represent both peoples, who have managed to maintain their identity despite isolation, the pressures of the jungle and growing contact with the outside world.
The Emberá-Wounaan comarca was created by Law 22 of November 8, 1983, on land taken from the province of Darién. It is divided into two main non-contiguous areas — Cémaco and Sambú — in the heart of the Darién jungle, and it has its own traditional government through congresses and chiefs.
Its creation was part of the process of recognizing Panama's Indigenous territories that began with Guna autonomy in 1925 and continued through the 20th century. Much of the comarca overlaps or borders Darién National Park, which links the protection of Indigenous culture to that of nature, in one of the most biodiverse regions on the continent.
The Emberá-Wounaan comarca is among the most remote regions of Panama and the most exuberant in its nature, reached above all by river in dugout canoes. Its people keep a way of life tied to fishing, hunting, subsistence farming and craftwork, although contact with the outside world and pressure on the forest pose growing challenges.
Some Emberá communities — including those on land near the Canal and Gatún and Alajuela lakes, outside the comarca — have successfully developed community tourism, receiving visitors who arrive by canoe to learn about their dances, their cooking, their crafts, jagua painting and their relationship with the forest. It is one of the most sought-after cultural experiences in the country and a way of sustaining their economy while preserving their environment.
The comarca and the Emberá and Wounaan communities face mounting pressures today: deforestation and the spread of cattle ranching and illicit crops in the Darién, informal mining, and the impact of the great wave of migration crossing the jungle northward, which affects their territories and resources.
At the same time, these peoples are fighting for title to their collective lands, many of them still without formal recognition outside the comarca, and to preserve their language and culture against growing outside influence. Their future is bound, more than that of almost any other Panamanian people, to the fate of the country's last great jungle.
The Guna Yala comarca — officially called San Blas until 1998 — is the autonomous territory of the Guna people (or Kuna, in the older spelling), on the eastern Caribbean coast of Panama. It stretches along a narrow mainland strip and across an archipelago of more than 360 islands of coral, sand and palm trees, of which barely fifty or so are inhabited.
The Guna, who in pre-Columbian times lived in the Darién jungle and the mountains of the interior, moved gradually to the coastal islands between the 18th and 19th centuries, seeking to escape mainland diseases, mosquitoes and colonial pressure. There they developed a matrilineal, tightly knit society, famous for its molas, the colorful hand-sewn textiles made with a reverse-appliqué technique that are the emblem of their culture.
After independence in 1903, the young Panamanian state set out to 'civilize' the Guna and forcibly integrate them into Western culture. Police detachments were installed on the islands, ceremonies and rituals were banned, and women were pressured to give up the mola, the nose ring and their traditional ornaments in favor of Western dress. On some islands women's noses were pierced by force.
That policy of aggressive assimilation, together with the abuses of the colonial police, kindled deep resentment among the Guna, who saw their identity, their religion and their autonomy under threat. Tension built up for years until it overflowed in 1925 in an armed uprising.
The founding event of Guna autonomy was the Dule Revolution (also called the Guna or Tule Revolution), which broke out in February 1925. Led by Nele Kantule, chief of the island of Ustupu, and Simral Colman, chief of Ailigandí, and backed by the American adventurer Richard Marsh, the Guna took up arms, attacked the police posts, drove out the colonial police and went so far as to proclaim a short-lived Republic of Tule.
On March 4, 1925, an agreement was reached, mediated by the United States, that ended hostilities in exchange for the Panamanian state respecting Guna customs, religion and forms of organization. That pact laid the basis for the recognition of their territory, which was formalized in 1938 and fully organized as a comarca in 1953. It was the first Indigenous autonomy recognized in the Americas, a pioneering model of self-government.
Guna Yala is governed by the Guna General Congress and by its saglas, the traditional chiefs, who run the comarca with broad autonomy over its territory, its tourism and its resources. The Guna control visitor access to the islands, which receive travelers drawn by white-sand beaches, turquoise water and a living culture, staying in simple cabins run by the communities.
The sale of molas, along with fishing, coconuts and tourism, are the pillars of the comarca's economy. Molas, genuine works of textile art depicting animals, plants and geometric motifs, have become a symbol of Panama and a source of income and cultural pride for Guna women, who sew them and wear them as part of their everyday dress.
Today the comarca's great challenge is climate change: rising sea levels and erosion threaten the lowest and most densely populated islands. In 2024, the community of Gardí Sugdub carried out one of the first planned relocations of an entire population to the mainland for climate reasons, a case that traveled around the world.
Guna Yala has thus become a global symbol both of Indigenous resistance and autonomy and of the vulnerability of coastal peoples to global warming. On its islands, the memory of the 1925 revolution, the vitality of a culture that resisted assimilation, and the awareness of an uncertain future shaped by rising water all exist side by side.
Herrera occupies the north of the Azuero Peninsula, the region considered the cradle of Panamanian nationhood and folklore. Before the conquest it was inhabited by Indigenous peoples with a long pottery tradition, whose legacy can still be felt in the handmade ceramics of towns such as La Arena, where clay is still shaped by hand and on the wheel. During the colonial period, Azuero was settled by Spanish families who gave rise to a strong rural, inland culture with deeply marked Hispanic roots.
From that root came many of the symbols of Panamanian identity: the pollera, the national dress; the pintao straw hats; the tamborito, the cumbia and the mejorana; and an intense calendar of patron-saint festivals, carnivals and folk gatherings that make the region the great heartland of the country's traditions.
The town of La Arena, on the edge of Chitré, is the great pottery center of Panama. Its artisans make jars, pots, planters and figures from a characteristic reddish clay, in a tradition rooted in the ceramics of the pre-Columbian peoples of Azuero and one that has earned both national and international prestige. The kilns and workshops of the town keep alive techniques handed down from generation to generation.
That continuity between prehispanic pottery and present-day craft makes the area a unique place to grasp the cultural depth of the peninsula. La Arena ceramics are today among the most recognizable souvenirs and symbols of the Panamanian interior.
The city of Chitré is the capital of Herrera and the main urban, commercial and services center of the whole Azuero Peninsula. Colonial in origin, it was made the provincial capital when Herrera was constituted as a province in the 20th century, and since then it has established itself as a meeting point for the Panamanian interior, today a dynamic city that combines tradition and modernity.
Its cathedral of San Juan Bautista, its museums — such as the Museo de Herrera and, in neighboring Villa de Los Santos, the Museo de la Nacionalidad — and its closeness to the folkloric towns make it the natural base for exploring Azuero. Chitré is also famous for its patron-saint festivals, its bullfights in the local style and its intense traditional life.
In the interior of Herrera, the town of Pesé is synonymous with sugarcane: its fertile plains are covered in cane fields that supply the production of seco, the cane spirit that is Panama's national distilled drink. The harvest and the milling set the rhythm of local life and are marked with traditional festivities, and Pesé is also famous for its living reenactment of the Passion of Christ during Holy Week.
That farming economy — cane, cattle, corn — and its towns of low houses, colonial churches and religious devotions preserve the authentic flavor of deep Panama. The distillery that produces the country's most popular seco is part of the landscape and the identity of this corner of Herrera.
Small though it is, Herrera also holds valuable natural areas. On its coast, the Cenegón del Mangle Wildlife Refuge and other wetlands protect mangroves and water birds, while the El Montuoso Forest Reserve, in the highlands of the south of the province, preserves woodland and headwaters.
But it is culture that defines Herrera: the mejorana festivals, the carnival tunas, the making of polleras and hats, and an intense popular religiosity. Despite its small size, it is one of the provinces with the richest and most clearly defined cultural identity in the country, a place where traditions are not a show for tourists but a living part of everyday life.
The province of Los Santos holds a central place in the country's history: it was in the Villa de Los Santos that, on November 10, 1821, the so-called First Cry of Independence was raised, the pronouncement against the Spanish authorities that precipitated Panama's separation from Spain, completed a few weeks later in the city of Panama. That is why the region is known as the cradle of nationhood.
Popular tradition has immortalized the figure of Rufina Alfaro, a young woman credited with helping the patriots, as the emblem of that moment. The movement in Los Santos spread quickly through Las Tablas, Natá, Penonomé and other inland towns, showing that Panamanian independence was born first in the countryside rather than in the capital.
Settled since colonial times by inland families with strong Spanish and country roots, Los Santos preserved traditions, ways of speaking, music and customs that came to stand for what is quintessentially Panamanian. The province is the land of the mejorana — both the instrument and the musical genre — of sung décimas, of the tamborito, and of a deep religious devotion expressed in patron-saint festivals across its territory.
Its capital, Las Tablas, is a historic inland town that safeguards that legacy. Rural life in Los Santos, with its cattle ranches, its cobbled streets and colonial churches, keeps an unhurried, traditional rhythm that contrasts with the modernity of the national capital.
Las Tablas, capital of Los Santos, is famous for two things. The first is its carnival, considered the most celebrated and spectacular in Panama, with its traditional rivalry between the tunas of Calle Arriba and Calle Abajo, its floats, its queens, its water-truck soakings and its four days of overflowing festivity. The second is that it is the land of the pollera, the national dress, whose handmade production — months of embroidery — is celebrated every year at the National Pollera Festival.
That concentration of traditions — the tamborito, the cumbia, the mejorana, the patron-saint festivals, the popular religiosity — makes Los Santos the epicenter of Panamanian folklore. Few places condense the cultural identity of the country as intensely as this small province in southern Azuero.
The southeastern tip of the province, around the quiet town of Pedasí, has become one of the fashionable coastal destinations in Panama. Its open-ocean beaches, nearby Isla Iguana — a wildlife refuge with coral reefs — and the relaxed feel of the town draw people who come for nature, sport fishing and the sea.
A few kilometers away, Playa Venao is today one of the country's surfing meccas and the venue for international events, with a bohemian, cosmopolitan atmosphere that has transformed this former fishing cove. The combination of world-class waves, undeveloped beaches and closeness to the folk traditions of Azuero has made the Los Santos coast a destination on the rise.
The coast of Los Santos is also a sanctuary for marine life. On Isla de Cañas, a long sandy island near Tonosí, thousands of sea turtles — mostly olive ridley and green — nest every year in one of the largest arribadas in the country, a spectacle that has become a responsible-tourism attraction managed by the local communities.
Between July and October, the Pacific waters off Los Santos receive humpback whales, which come to mate and raise their calves and can be watched on trips out of Pedasí and Playa Venao. Nature, surf and tradition live side by side in a province that combines the most folkloric Panama with the most maritime and adventurous.
The Ngäbe-Buglé comarca is home to the two most numerous Indigenous peoples of Panama: the Ngäbe and the Buglé, historically known to the Spanish as Guaymí, although they are two distinct ethnic groups with different languages. Their ancestors inhabited the west of the isthmus from pre-Columbian times and resisted the conquest under chiefs such as Urracá.
They are peoples with a farming tradition, growing corn, rice, coffee and root crops on the mountain slopes, and with a rich craft culture. They are known for their chácaras (bags woven from natural fibers), chaquiras (wide collars of colored beads with geometric designs) and naguas, the long, brightly colored dresses worn by the women, today one of the most recognizable visual symbols of Indigenous Panama.
For centuries the Ngäbe and Buglé lived scattered across the provinces of Chiriquí, Veraguas and Bocas del Toro, keeping their language, their religion — including the prophetic mama tata movement — and their customs despite marginalization, poverty and the lack of recognized land of their own. Many worked as day laborers on the coffee and banana estates of the west, often in precarious conditions.
That situation of dispossession and neglect fed, through the 20th century, an organized movement demanding legal recognition of their ancestral territory, as the Guna had already achieved. The struggle for a comarca became the great political cause of the Ngäbe-Buglé people.
After long decades of demands, the Ngäbe-Buglé comarca was created by Law 10 of March 7, 1997, with land carved out of the provinces of Chiriquí, Veraguas and Bocas del Toro. It is the largest Indigenous comarca in the country in area and population — with more than 200,000 inhabitants — with its own traditional system of government headed by congresses and regional chiefs, and its capital at Llano Tugrí (Buäbti).
Its creation was a historic victory for the Panamanian Indigenous movement, which sought to protect its land and culture against the advance of settlers and companies. Even so, the comarca remains one of the poorest regions in the country, with severe shortfalls in drinking water, health care, education and roads.
In recent decades the Ngäbe and Buglé peoples have waged intense struggles in defense of their territory against large extractive projects. The mobilizations against mining at the Cerro Colorado deposit — one of the largest copper deposits in the world — and against the construction of the Barro Blanco hydroelectric dam on the Tabasará River became emblematic of Indigenous environmentalism in Central America.
In 2012, protests against mining in the comarca left people dead and wounded and forced the government to negotiate laws protecting the territory. These struggles made the Ngäbe-Buglé people a continental reference point in the defense of Indigenous rights and of water against the extractive model.
The comarca extends across the mountains and hills of western Panama, a territory of great natural beauty but difficult access, with tracks that can often only be traveled on foot or on horseback. Its people keep a way of life tied to subsistence farming, small-scale livestock and craftwork, in close relation with the land.
Today the comarca combines the defense of its autonomy and its culture with the challenge of development. Many Ngäbe work each season on the coffee harvest in the Chiriquí highlands, in a close — and at times conflictive — relationship with the economy of western Panama. The preservation of their language and traditions coexists with migration, poverty and the slow arrival of basic services.
On August 15, 1519, Pedrarias Dávila founded the city of Panama on the shore of the Pacific: it was the first European city on the Pacific coast of the American continent and the platform from which the conquest of Peru was organized. For a century and a half it prospered as the head of the silver route, with its cathedral, its convents and its thriving trade, until in January 1671 the pirate Henry Morgan stormed, sacked and burned it.
Two years later, in 1673, the city was refounded some eight kilometers to the west, on a more defensible, walled peninsula: today's Casco Viejo, or Casco Antiguo. The ruins of the original city, now known as Panamá Viejo — with its iconic cathedral tower — and the historic ensemble of the Casco Antiguo were declared UNESCO World Heritage Sites in 1997, a unique testimony to that double founding.
The Casco Antiguo, built after the destruction of 1671, was for centuries the heart of the city. Its cobbled streets mix Spanish colonial architecture, French-influenced buildings from the canal era and republican mansions, with churches such as San José and its famous Golden Altar, the Metropolitan Cathedral, and historic squares such as the Plaza de la Independencia, where the separation from Colombia was proclaimed in 1903.
After decades of decay, the neighborhood was restored and revitalized from the late 20th century onward, becoming the tourist, culinary and cultural epicenter of the capital. Its balconies, its viewpoints over the bay and the modern skyline, and its nightlife make the Casco one of the most visited places in the country.
Panama City, capital of the republic and seat of the province, has always been a city of transit: through it passed colonial silver, the California gold seekers, and the builders of the railroad and the Canal. Its history is inseparable from the interoceanic waterway, whose Pacific mouth opens a few kilometers from downtown.
At the Miraflores locks, next to the capital, visitors watch enormous ships passing through the Canal, one of the greatest engineering works in the world, from a modern visitor center. The Amador Causeway — built with rock excavated from the Canal to link several islands — and the Bridge of the Americas connect the city with the Pacific and with the rest of the continent, while the former Canal Zone, today fully Panamanian, holds neighborhoods, parks and ruins from the American era.
Today Panama City is one of the great financial metropolises of Latin America, with a spectacular skyline of towers facing the Pacific, the first metro in Central America — opened in 2014 — and the Tocumen air hub, which connects the continent. It is a banking, commercial and logistics center that concentrates a large share of the country's economy.
It surprises visitors with its combination of nature and city: the Metropolitan Natural Park, a tropical forest reserve within the urban area, is one of the few of its kind in the world, and the Canal is flanked by jungle full of life, monkeys and birds. The BioMuseo, designed by Frank Gehry, celebrates the biodiversity of the isthmus and Panama's role as a biological bridge between the Americas.
Off the capital, in the Gulf of Panama, the Las Perlas Archipelago owes its name to the extraordinary abundance of pearls that Balboa and the first Spaniards found in its waters; on Isla Contadora, tradition has it, the pearls taken from the sea were counted before being shipped to Spain. From here came the famous Peregrina, one of the most celebrated pearls in history.
Today the archipelago is a destination for idyllic beaches, diving and rest, with Contadora as its most developed island. Between July and October its waters receive more than a thousand humpback whales that arrive from both hemispheres to breed, making it one of the best places in the world to watch them. Panamá province thus brings together the historic, economic, cultural and tourist heart of the country.
Although Panamá Oeste is the newest province in the country, the territory it occupies has a long history reaching far back in time. Before the conquest, this strip of the central Pacific was inhabited by Indigenous peoples related to the cultures of the so-called Arco Seco and of Gran Coclé, societies of farmers, fishers and potters who made use of the fertile land and the rivers running down from the mountains to the sea. Its closeness to the interoceanic transit route turned the region into a passageway from the earliest colonial times.
During the colonial period the territory was tied to the city of Panama and to the roads linking the capital with the interior. Tradition places the origin of La Chorrera around the middle of the 16th century, with a founding attributed to governor Sancho Clavijo on September 12, 1550, although the settlement took definite shape as a parish seat in the 18th century, around the chapel built beside the great waterfall that gave it its name. It was a land of cattle ranches and croplands, dotted with estates such as that of the Spaniard Juana María Bautista de la Coba, whose title deeds illustrate the agrarian regime of the period.
That role as the capital's agricultural hinterland — supplying meat, corn, fruit and firewood to the city of Panama — shaped its character for centuries. This was not a zone of great fairs or fortresses like the Caribbean coast of Colón, but a rural back country whose importance would grow only when the expansion of the capital, in the 20th century, began to devour its fields and turn them into city.
After independence from Spain and the union with Gran Colombia in 1821, the region organized itself around La Chorrera as its administrative seat. For much of the 19th century the town was the head of one of the cantons of the Department, or Intendancy, of Panama: the Cantón de La Chorrera, which grouped together the parish districts of Arraiján, Capira, Chame, La Chorrera and San Carlos. In other words, the same five districts that almost two centuries later would form the province of Panamá Oeste already existed, from that point on, as a recognizable territorial unit.
With the Law of September 12, 1855, which gave life to the Federal State of Panama and established the system of districts, La Chorrera achieved the status of a municipal district. Through the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, life in the region continued to revolve around agriculture, cattle and local commerce, with a slow civic awakening. In 1922 the Centro Chorrerano de Hombres y Mujeres was founded, a civic association that set out to fight economic backwardness and push forward public works in the town, a sign of a community starting to demand better services and infrastructure.
That historical continuity of the La Chorrera nucleus and its five neighboring districts was the underlying argument that, generations later, would justify the creation of a province of its own. Panamá Oeste was not an arbitrary administrative invention but the formal recognition of a region that already had an identity, a memory and internal boundaries inherited from the 19th century.
A large part of the contemporary history of Panamá Oeste is written by the Canal and by the American military presence on its western bank. The district of Arraiján, hard against the west side of the waterway, was included in the Pacific sector of the former Canal Zone and filled up with United States military installations: the Rodman naval base, built between 1932 and 1937; the Farfán naval radio station, raised between 1941 and 1948; and the Bruja airfield, opened in 1939, which in 1942 was renamed Howard Air Force Base in honor of Major Charles H. Howard. Beside it, Fort Kobbe — renamed in 1932 in honor of General William A. Kobbe — completed the defensive belt on the Pacific flank of the Canal.
In fulfillment of the 1977 Torrijos-Carter Treaties, these installations reverted gradually to Panamanian sovereignty between 1979 and December 31, 1999. Howard base was handed over to Panama on November 1, 1999, and the Americans left the country for good at the end of that year. Suddenly the young territory in the west inherited thousands of hectares of idle airfields, hangars, docks and barracks.
The Panamanian government converted the former military enclave into the Panamá Pacífico Special Economic Area, an ambitious business, logistics and housing hub built on the old Howard base, with its own civilian international airport. In this way the piece of Panamá Oeste that for almost a century had been forbidden territory under a foreign flag became one of the economic engines of the province and a symbol of the recovery of national sovereignty.
The dizzying growth of recent decades made administrative separation inevitable. The strip west of the Canal, which until then formed part of the enormous province of Panamá, had become one of the most populated and dynamic regions in the country, yet it still depended on a provincial capital on the other side of the interoceanic waterway, reachable only across the Bridge of the Americas and the Centennial Bridge, congested every day by tens of thousands of commuters.
Through Law 119 of December 30, 2013, the National Assembly created the province of Panamá Oeste, which began operating on January 1, 2014. It thus became the tenth province of Panama, with its capital at La Chorrera and its five historic districts — Arraiján, Capira, Chame, La Chorrera and San Carlos — divided into some sixty corregimientos. With around 2,786 square kilometers, the new province stretched from the bank of the Canal to the border with Coclé, and from the Pacific beaches up to the heights of the mountains.
The creation answered a blunt demographic reality: the population of the territory had jumped from about 207,000 inhabitants in 1990 to more than 464,000 in 2010, and would pass 650,000 by 2023, with Arraiján and La Chorrera as the poles of explosive growth. Giving that mass of people institutions of its own — a governor's office, courts, public services — was a long-postponed necessity that was finally resolved.
Despite its rapid urbanization, La Chorrera and the province retain a strong cultural identity with rural, inland roots. The capital is known throughout the country as the city of bollo and chicheme: chicheme, a thick, sweet drink made from corn, milk, cinnamon and vanilla, is a local emblem celebrated every year at the Bollo and Chicheme Festival in the community of El Chorro. The bollo, a corn dough roll, along with sweets and cheeses, completes a traditional larder that makes the city a food stop on the road toward the interior.
The symbolic heart of La Chorrera is El Chorro, the spectacular waterfall that gives the city its name and beside which, according to tradition, the town's first chapel was raised in the 18th century. Around that fall and the neighboring streams — the Trinidad chorro, the one at Caño Quebrada — community life was woven, and the spot remains a marker of identity and a place for a Sunday outing.
The province also keeps alive the folk expressions of the central Pacific: dances, tamboritos, patron-saint festivals and a deeply rooted religious devotion. That traditional substratum coexists today, in tension, with the flood of housing developments, shopping malls and dormitory neighborhoods that have transformed the landscape, in a province torn between its rural past and its metropolitan present.
The great tourist draw of Panamá Oeste is its Pacific beaches, the closest to the capital and therefore the favorite seaside escape for the people of Panama City. Since the middle of the 20th century, the area of Coronado, Gorgona, San Carlos and the neighboring beaches has filled with weekend houses, resorts, golf courses and beach clubs. Playa Coronado, some 88 kilometers from the capital, with its characteristic sand mixing light and dark grains of volcanic origin, is the most developed, today almost a small service town in its own right. Farther west, the long, windy sand spit of Punta Chame has established itself as the kitesurfing capital of Panama, with strong winds between January and May that draw riders from all over the world.
Toward the mountains, in the district of Capira, rises Altos de Campana National Park, created in 1966 as the first national park in Panama. Its almost five thousand hectares of forest and volcanic cliffs protect notable biodiversity and offer viewpoints looking out over the Pacific and the entrance to the Canal, a reminder that the province is not only coastline and suburb but also mountain and forest.
That contrast defines the present of Panamá Oeste. With Arraiján and La Chorrera among the fastest-growing cities in the country, the province carries the problems of disorderly urban expansion: drinking-water shortages, an overwhelmed transport system, land speculation and pressure on the environment. The extension of the metro toward La Chorrera and plans for a fourth bridge over the Canal aim to ease the daily commute of those who cross toward the capital each morning. Between its beaches, its Campana forest, its Chorrera heritage and its role as a vast expanding suburb, Panamá Oeste embodies as few places do the accelerated pulse of the country in the 21st century.
The name Veraguas goes back to the earliest days of the conquest: the region was explored by Christopher Columbus in 1502, during his fourth voyage, in search of the gold mines the Indigenous peoples spoke of. His name became so bound up with this land that his descendants received the title of Duke of Veragua, a noble rank linked to the Columbus family that still exists today.
During the colonial period, Veraguas was an inland mining and farming region, with gold workings and a scattered population. Being the only Panamanian province with coasts on both the Pacific and the Caribbean gives it a singular geographic character, and its history interweaves the memory of Columbus with that of the Indigenous peoples who resisted the conquest.
Veraguas was one of the territories of the most stubborn Indigenous resistance. From the mountains of Veraguas and Chiriquí, the chief Urracá led a long war against the Spanish in the first half of the 16th century, holding out for almost a decade and inflicting notable defeats on the Crown's troops. He was never beaten on the battlefield, and his figure became a lasting emblem of the dignity and the struggle of the Indigenous peoples.
Today Urracá appears on the national currency and gives his name to institutions and places all over the country. His memory links the pre-Columbian past of Veraguas with contemporary Panamanian identity, in a province proud of its Indigenous roots and of its part in the first episodes of resistance to the conquest.
The provincial capital, Santiago de Veraguas, sitting on the Pan-American Highway at the geographic center of the isthmus, established itself as the great urban, educational and commercial center of central Panama. Colonial in origin, the city was for a long time the crossroads between eastern and western Panama, and today it is an important hub of services and transit.
Nearby, the historic church of San Francisco de la Montaña, in the village of San Francisco, holds one of the most remarkable sets of colonial baroque altarpieces in Panama, carved in wood and covered in gold leaf, a testimony to the religious art of the country's interior.
In the mountains in the north of the province, the town of Santa Fe de Veraguas — founded in colonial times — is today an ecotourism and mountain destination, surrounded by cloud forest, waterfalls, rivers and farms growing coffee and orchids. Its cool climate, its viewpoints and its natural setting make it ideal for hiking, swimming in river pools and birdwatching.
This Veraguas interior preserves strong rural traditions, crafts — such as pintao hats and weaving — and a country life that reflects deep Panama, between the central mountains and the Pacific plains. Santa Fe is also known for its coffee cooperative and for its orchid fair, which draw visitors every year.
The natural jewel of Veraguas is Coiba Island, the largest island in Panama and in Central America. Between 1919 and 2004 it operated as a penal colony, a feared prison that during the military dictatorships held political prisoners; paradoxically, that use as a jail kept the island close to pristine for almost a century. With the prison closed, in 2005 UNESCO declared Coiba National Park a World Heritage Site.
Coiba is one of the finest diving destinations in the tropical eastern Pacific: its waters hold sharks, manta rays, turtles, dolphins, whales in season and astonishing marine biodiversity, in an archipelago of reefs, white beaches and jungle. Its gateway is Santa Catalina, a former fishing village turned into one of the surfing meccas of Central America. Together with Coiba, it makes Veraguas an essential destination for anyone who loves the sea.