🇵🇦 Panama · Panama City and the Canal
Few places tell the story of the collision between gold, ambition and the sea the way Panamá Viejo does. Here on the Pacific coast, in 1519, rose the first European city founded on that shore of the American continent: Nuestra Señora de la Asunción de Panamá. Much of Peru's silver passed through its streets on the way to Spain, and that made it one of the richest and most coveted cities in the empire, until the pirate Henry Morgan reduced it to ashes in 1671.
Today what remains of that city is an archaeological park of towers, walls and stone arches scattered across the grass, with the modern skyscrapers of Panama City rising behind: a jarring contrast between the 16th century and the 21st. The most emblematic piece is the cathedral tower, which survived the fire and the centuries and which you can now climb to look down over the site. Around it you can pick out the foundations of convents, hospitals, the main square and grand houses.
This guide walks through Panamá Viejo with a practical and warm eye: what exactly you see among the ruins, how to use the museum and the scale model to grasp the city that once stood here, how to get there from the center, how to combine it with the Casco Antiguo, the successor city built after the destruction, and how to do it comfortably despite the heat. It's an essential visit for understanding why Panama City is the way it is.
Panama was founded on 15 August 1519 by governor Pedro Arias Dávila (Pedrarias Dávila) on the site of an Indigenous fishing settlement on the Pacific coast, under the name Nuestra Señora de la Asunción de Panamá. It was the first permanent Spanish city on the Pacific shore of the Americas and quickly became crucial: the expeditions of conquest toward Peru set out from its port, and through it passed the Andean gold and silver that crossed the isthmus along the Camino Real and the Camino de Cruces bound for Portobelo and, from there, Spain. That wealth made it a prosperous city, with a cathedral, convents, hospitals and thousands of inhabitants, but also a target for pirates. On 28 January 1671 the Welsh privateer Henry Morgan, having crossed the isthmus, defeated the defending forces at the battle of Mata Asnillos, and the city ended up burned and destroyed (who set the fire is still debated). Two years later, in 1673, the survivors decided not to rebuild on the same spot and founded a new walled city a few kilometers to the southwest, on a peninsula that was easier to defend: today's Casco Antiguo. The ruins of Panamá la Vieja were left abandoned and, in time, became an archaeological site now managed by the Patronato Panamá Viejo and declared a Unesco World Heritage Site in 1997. 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.
Panamá la Vieja was born of the conquest of the isthmus. After Vasco Núñez de Balboa sighted the 'South Sea' (the Pacific Ocean) in 1513, the Spanish Crown saw in this ribbon of land the key point for connecting the two oceans and reaching toward the riches suspected to lie to the south. On 15 August 1519 the governor of Castilla del Oro, Pedro Arias Dávila, known as Pedrarias Dávila, founded the city of Nuestra Señora de la Asunción de Panamá on the site of an Indigenous fishing village on the Pacific coast.
It thereby became the first permanent Spanish city founded on the Pacific shore anywhere in the Americas, a landmark that would shape its destiny. From the very first moment its value was strategic: it was the head of the isthmus on the Pacific side, the point from which expeditions to the south would be organized and through which, in the other direction, the riches to be shipped to Spain would arrive.
As for the name 'Panamá' itself, there are several traditional explanations: the most widespread holds that it comes from an Indigenous word meaning 'abundance of fish' or 'abundance of butterflies', in reference to the natural richness of the place. Whatever the exact origin of the toponym, the city took the name of the region, and from there it would later come to designate the whole country.
What turned Panama into one of the most important and wealthiest cities in Spanish America was its position on the empire's great route of riches. With the conquest of Peru from the 1530s onward, enormous quantities of gold and, above all, silver began to flow from the Andes toward Spain. That silver reached the port of Panama on the Pacific by sea, and from there had to cross the isthmus overland to reach the Caribbean and be loaded for Europe.
The crossing was made along two routes that started in Panama: the Camino Real, a mule track running straight to Nombre de Dios and later to Portobelo, and the Camino de Cruces, which combined an overland stretch with navigation down the Chagres River. For nearly two centuries, immense fortunes in precious metals passed along those roads, along with goods of every kind. Panama functioned as the great redistribution center for trade between the southern Pacific and the mother country.
That traffic made the city flourish. Panamá la Vieja came to have a cathedral, several convents (Dominican, Franciscan, Jesuit, Augustinian and Conceptionist nuns), hospitals, a cabildo, grand houses and thousands of inhabitants, among them Spaniards, creoles, Indigenous people and a large enslaved African population. Its wealth, however, also made it a permanent target for Spain's enemies: the privateers and pirates prowling the Caribbean dreamed of sacking the city through which Peru's silver passed.
The city's great fear came true in 1671. The Welsh privateer Henry Morgan, in the service of England and based in Jamaica, put together one of the largest plundering expeditions in Caribbean history. After taking the fort of San Lorenzo at the mouth of the Chagres River, Morgan went up the river and crossed the isthmus with over a thousand men to fall on the rich city of Panama from the Pacific side.
On 28 January 1671 (by the calendar of the time), the city's forces, commanded by governor Juan Pérez de Guzmán, marched out to meet the invaders on the outskirts, in what became known as the battle of Mata Asnillos (or Matasnillos). The Spanish defense was defeated and the pirates entered Panama. Amid the fighting and the looting, the city was consumed by an enormous fire that reduced it practically to ashes. Morgan and his men stayed for several weeks, sacking what they could before withdrawing loaded with booty.
The destruction was so complete that the city was never rebuilt on the same spot. The flames devoured the wooden buildings, and only the stone structures, such as the cathedral tower, were left standing. That fire of 1671 brought a century and a half of history to an end for the first Panama and opened the way to the founding of a new city.
After the destruction of 1671, the authorities and the survivors took a crucial decision: not to rebuild the city on its original site, exposed and hard to defend, but to found it anew somewhere else. The place chosen was a rocky peninsula a few kilometers to the southwest, in the area known today as San Felipe, far easier to protect since it was almost surrounded by sea and could be walled.
The new city of Panama was officially established in 1673 and built with a system of walls, bastions and fortifications that made it a stronghold. This is today's Casco Antiguo (or Casco Viejo) of Panama City, with its colonial streets, churches and squares, which would in time also be recognized as World Heritage. Many of the materials and relics saved from the old city, including, by tradition, the celebrated Golden Altar of the church of San José, were moved to the new site.
While the new Panama grew and became the center of colonial life, the site of the razed city was left abandoned. Its ruins, exposed to the vegetation and the passing of time, remained as an enormous testimony in stone to the first city on the Pacific. Over the centuries, the expansion of modern Panama City ended up surrounding those ruins, which now share the ground with skyscrapers.
For a long time the ruins of Panamá la Vieja remained an abandoned site on the outskirts of the new city, exposed to nature and, later, to the pressure of urban growth. As Panama City expanded eastward in the 19th and 20th centuries, the area of the ruins risked being swallowed by development, and was even crossed by roads and buildings.
As the 20th century wore on, awareness of the site's historical value grew. Campaigns of study, conservation and archaeological excavation brought to light not only the remains of the colonial city but also traces of the Indigenous settlement that preceded the Spanish arrival. The cathedral tower, the convents, the hospitals and the urban layout were consolidated and placed under protection.
To manage and preserve the complex, the Patronato Panamá Viejo was created, the body responsible for running the site, the excavations and the museum. Thanks to that work, what might have vanished under concrete became an archaeological park open to the public and one of the capital's leading historical attractions, with its site museum, its scale model and its interpretive routes.
International recognition came in 1997, when Unesco inscribed on its World Heritage list the property 'Archaeological Site of Panamá Viejo and Historic District of Panamá', bringing together the ruins of the original city (Panamá la Vieja) and the Casco Antiguo (San Felipe), the city that succeeded it after the destruction of 1671. The listing recognizes the exceptional value of this ensemble as evidence of Spanish colonial urbanization in the Americas and of its role in transcontinental trade routes.
Panamá la Vieja also carries an enormous symbolic weight for the country: it is the very origin of Panama City and, in a sense, of the nation that took its name. Its ruins are a reminder that this city was born as a bridge between two oceans and two continents, a vocation for transit that runs through its entire history: from the Camino Real of colonial silver to the Panama Canal of the modern era.
Today the site works as an educational, cultural and tourist space. It receives students, researchers and visitors from around the world, and has become part of the life of the capital with its museum, its craft market and its waterfront walk. The contrast between the old 16th-century stones and the skyscrapers of the contemporary skyline has become one of the most representative images of Panama: the memory of the first city on the Pacific keeping watch over the growth of the metropolis that inherited it.