By Nicholas DeRenzo
Panama is a country that has always been at the crossroads, quite literally: dividing two continents, separating two oceans, and at the very heart of global trade. Its culture has grown and blossomed from that position, with influences drawn liberally and joyfully from West Africa, East Asia, the Caribbean, a robust Indigenous community, and especially Americans, who for 96 years controlled the 533-square-mile Canal Zone. These days, Panamanians face a crossroads of a different kind. As high-rises sprout like weeds and expats flood into the boomtown capital, there’s a renewed effort to look inward, with a younger generation elevating classic dishes, reinvesting in Indigenous experiences, and sprucing up colonial neighborhoods. Now is a great time for travelers to engage with Panama’s complicated past, while also embracing its forward-facing spirit of creativity.
Day 1
Real Panama hats, textile crafts, and a theatrical dinner in Casco Antiguo
Waking up at Hotel La Compañía, in the heart of the centuries-old Casco Antiguo, is a bit like experiencing Panama City’s history in microcosm. The hotel comprises three wings: a Spanish colonial one from the 1680s, one built in 1739 by Jesuit priests, and a Beaux-Arts department store from 1904. I’m in the Spanish wing, where the ceiling beams hint at the building’s former life, and the walls look thick enough to stop a cannonball.
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a grander breakfast room than El Santuario. It’s all stone arches and stained glass, complete with a see-through floor panel over a historic well. At the buffet, I fill my plate with assorted little fried things—tortillas de maiz (corn cakes) and almojábanos (cheese-filled fritters), which I douse in a fiery hot sauce. I eat them in the courtyard, where a towering avocado tree attracts an assortment of chattery birds.
Breakfast finished, I take a spin around Casco Antiguo’s warren of narrow streets and bustling plazas, watched over by imposing statues of conquistadores and libertadores. The neighborhood was built up in the 1670s after a previous settlement—Panamá Viejo, the oldest European settlement on the Pacific coast of the Americas—was destroyed by Captain Henry Morgan (yes, like the rum).
You’ll still find remnants of that old city in the “new” one, as its stones were reused in the defensive walls and the many elaborate churches here. The grandest of these is the Renaissance-style Metropolitan Cathedral, which took 108 years to construct and was gussied up in 2019 for a papal visit.
As Indigenous performers dance to an eerie flute song in the plaza out front of the cathedral, I duck inside to explore. I’m struck by a statue of a friar holding a broom and standing next to a cat, a dog, and a mouse all drinking peacefully from the same bowl. Drawing on my Catholic university education, I assume this critter-loving do-gooder is Francis of Assisi, but it turns out to be someone with a cooler backstory: Martín de Porres, the Peruvian-born patron saint of mixed-race people, who is often depicted along with this Tom-and-Jerry-and-Spike trifecta as a symbol of racial harmony. (Fun fact: He’s also the saint portrayed in Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” music video!)
In addition to churches, the brick-paved streets of Casco Antiguo are lined with businesses such as I Love Panama Chocolate, whose tourist-baiting name obscures the level of craftsmanship on display. I watch the chocolatiers at work and then pick up a few bars flavored with Panamanian rum and record-breakingly expensive Geisha coffee. (Last year, a pound sold for $4,588 at auction.)
For lunch, I have a reservation at Cantina del Tigre, a ceviche-centric place outside the colonial district that took the Highest New Entry award on the Latin America’s 50 Best Restaurants list last year. Chef Fulvio Miranda moonlights as a bassist, and the rocker vibe is evident in the massive tiger paintings on the walls. The food is equally bold: kampachi tartare with basil and tomato and crispy plantain chips, followed by hunks of succulent fried fish in an Afro-inspired mustard curry with coconut rice.
Back in the old town, at El Palacio del Sombrero, I contemplate buying a straw hat. You’ll encounter two kinds here: The fabled “Panama hat” is actually the Ecuadorian toquilla, which became associated with Panama after Teddy Roosevelt was photographed wearing one while sitting on a steam shovel during the construction of the canal. The real Panamanian hat is the sombrero pintao, which is also woven from natural fibers but is floppier and patterned. Sadly, it turns out I can’t pull off either of them.
I continue to the Museo de la Mola, a jewel box of a gallery dedicated to the namesake handicraft of the Guna people. An Indigenous group from eastern Panama and Colombia, the Guna craft intricate fabric panels that the women wear around their chests and backs. The textiles are made using a reverse appliqué process, which involves sewing together layers of colorful cloth and then cutting away strips and peeling back the edges to reveal the pattern. While molas traditionally feature patterns of animals, deities, and mythical creatures, the Guna have kept up with the times: The collection here includes pieces with playing-card kings and even Spider-Man.
Just next door, I stop for a pre-dinner drink at the neon-lit Barcito de Enfrente. This new co*cktail bar is connected to the popular restaurant Fonda Lo Que Hay, an updated version of a fonda, the unassuming food stands that dot Panamanian roadsides. The food gets raves, and while I’m tempted by the tuna carpaccio that keeps getting whisked by, I only have time for a quick Gibson acevichado, a bracing martini with a pickled onion redolent of ceviche.
Around the corner, I have a reservation at A to Z Chef’s Table, Ariel Zebede’s tasting-menu spot, which is hidden behind a bookshelf, speakeasy-style. Around a horseshoe-shaped counter, a small team of chef-servers dishes out theatrical plates, each with its own tale. Take the sourdough bread, made with the first wheat grown in the country and served with butter from cows that live on the same farm. “They know each other, they like each other, and they get along,” one staffer tells me. There’s also an aged yellowfin-tuna sashimi with finger limes, gooseberry, Thai curry sauce, cashew, and tangerine, followed by a one-bite cacio e pepe crisp that bursts with a goat cheese center. A spin on a lobster roll comes with Caribbean king crab meat, tzatziki, caviar, and a brown-butter reduction. “Don’t be scared to get messy,” Zebede instructs. At one point, the lights dim, and he drops a black ball on the table in front of me, lighting it on fire so it begins blazing in the darkness. After it burns out, he cracks open the ball—made from salt and charcoal—and a perfectly roasted sweet potato tumbles out.
A trio of desserts, including an incredible guava roll with Parmesan ice cream, comes last—or so I think. There’s one more theatrical flourish: a panel slowly descending from the ceiling, stocked with canelés. These hidden treats in this hidden restaurant seem an apt metaphor for a city where you never know what new wonder is tucked behind some colonial facade or bougainvillea-draped doorway.
Day 2
Watching ships scooch through the canal and appreciating Afro-Colonial culture in Portobelo
Panama’s shape threw me for a loop when I first arrived: Because of its position as a north-south connector, I’d always imagined it as an up-and-down bendy straw. In reality, it stretches east to west, sort of like an inverted tilde (as in, ñ), with Panama City on the southern, or Pacific, coast.
Today, I’m going all the way to the Caribbean shore, but because of the country’s skinny profile, it’ll only take about an hour by car. Octavio Rios, a guide with EcoCircuitos Panama, picks me up, and we head toward Portobelo, a hub for what’s known as Afro-Colonial—as opposed to Afro-Caribbean—culture. Enslavers brought scores of Africans to these shores, and a separate sub-culture from Afro-Caribbean ones developed here.
As we cut across the country, I mention that I feel an obligation to see the canal, but haven’t scheduled a visit yet. (It would be like going to Egypt and ignoring the pyramids.) Just like that, Rios makes a last-minute detour to the Agua Clara Locks, part of the canal’s 2016 expansion.
I was more of a dinosaur kid than a trucks-and-trainsets one, so I don’t expect to be wowed by a feat of engineering, but it only takes a few minutes to make me a convert. We watch from a platform next to the 111-year-old artificial Gatún Lake as a tiny tugboat guides a massive cargo ship into the lock, with mere feet of clearance on either side. The freighter then begins its 85-foot, stair-step descent to the Caribbean Sea. As we focus our gaze on the action, we notice a crocodile hauling tail, out-swimming the vessel. “He’s going to end up in the ocean,” Rios tells me, “but American crocodiles have a desalination gland, so he’ll be OK.” This, I think, appeals to my inner dino kid.
We continue toward Portobelo, taking winding roads that hug the shore and passing diablos rojos, American school buses that have been repurposed as public transportation and tricked out with riotously colorful paintings of characters, ranging from Mickey Mouse and the Minions to Manuel Noriega. On our way into town, Rios tells me about the Congo dance, a jubilant folkloric art form created by enslaved Africans that was at once a ritual and a subversive form of protest, all performed to a driving drum beat. “The Congo dance was a form of communication,” he says.
“The Spaniards wouldn’t let them keep their traditions, so they developed a dance that resembled Spanish culture.”
We arrive at the Casa de la Cultura Congo, overlooking the bay, where we’re greeted by Aristela “Mama Ari” Blandón, who teaches the tradition to younger people to help keep it alive. She dons the national dress, the pollera, which is made from a patchwork of colorful squares of fabric and hung with little mirrors for ornamentation. Centuries ago, enslaved Africans would have been given only scraps to make their clothes, but today the dress reads as a celebratory symbol of defiance against all odds.
“We dance barefoot because it’s a connection to Mother Earth,” Blandón tells me. With that, a procession of elaborately dressed children, from toddlers to teens, begins showing off fast-paced moves. On the surface, it resembles a Carnival dance, but there’s a cheeky political element, celebrating the resistance of the Cimarrónes, formerly enslaved Africans who escaped and created their own independent communities. Some of the students portray Black heroes and heroines, including a regal queen and the little bird who helped her; others get deliciously devious as the Spanish enslavers, who are depicted as literal devils.
After a lunch of corvina with coconut rice on the school’s shaded patio, Rios and I stroll through Portobelo’s UNESCO-designated fortifications. They’re still equipped with the cannons that would have kept out pirates like Sir Francis Drake, who died of dysentery nearby in 1596 and was buried at sea in a full suit of armor, inside a lead-lined coffin. (Despite efforts to find his remains, he’s still out there somewhere, apparently not far from shore.) “They’re doing restorations,” Rios tells me of the fort, “but the problem is that a lot of the original material was brain coral, and you can’t just go get more brain coral.”
Before heading back to the city, we stop at the Iglesia de San Felipe, a whitewashed 1814 church. Compared to the ornate Baroque structures in the capital, this is an unfussy, provincial chapel, but it’s home to one of the most beloved icons in the country: the Cristo Negro, a life-size, wooden statue of a dark-skinned Jesus that, according to legend, was found floating in the ocean in the 1600s. Today, it lives in a glass box, dressed in an ornate robe donated by devotees. (Past donors have included boxer Roberto Durán). Some 60,000 pilgrims have been known to descend on this village of fewer than 5,000 each October 21 to venerate the statue.
Back in Panama City, I make a pilgrimage of my own, to Pedro Mandinga, a women-owned rum distillery whose tasting room—with its whirring ceiling fans and vintage photos—feels like the kind of place where Ernest Hemingway might have hung out. I order a flight, which includes a complex Geisha coffee liqueur and the signature white rum, made from raspadura (unrefined sugar cane).
Dinner tonight is at Intimo, in the city’s San Francisco neighborhood. The interior is as candle-lit and inviting as the name suggests, and the kitchen operates under a 90/10 philosophy, with a commitment to sourcing 90 percent of its ingredients from within Panama. I settle in with a tamarind rum co*cktail and order the chef’s selection menu—what better way to discover a mission-driven restaurant’s mission? The standouts include a pastrami-cured tuna with a tangy leche de tigre and crispy puffed rice, as well as beef tartare with hojaldas (fried dough). The dish that will really stick with me, though, is a simple, ultra-custardy dessert that’s a cross between a torrija vasca (French toast) and a mamallena (bread pudding). The latter takes its name from the Spanish for “stuffed mama”—a perfect encapsulation of how this country’s outsized hospitality makes me feel.
Day 3
A visit with an Indigenous tribe in Chagres National Park and a lesson in biodiversity
The colonial confines of Casco Antiguo feel quite ancient, but to engage with this land as it existed even further back, I’ve booked another EcoCircuitos tour to visit Chagres National Park. Less than an hour’s drive from the city, the park is home to members of the Emberá community, an Indigenous tribe who migrated from Colombia in the late 1700s and settled in these parts about 50 years ago.
Octavio Rios is guiding me once again, and on the way to Chagres we stop at a roadside fruit stand to pick up the most fragrant pineapples and bananas I’ve ever smelled, which we’ll be gifting to our hosts. “The Emberá are Indigenous, but they’re also very much Panamanians,” Rios tells me. “You’ll see why they prefer this lifestyle.”
We drive into the rainforest-filled national park, and at a wide spot in the Chagres River we’re met by a teenaged member of the tribe, who motions for us to lower ourselves into a dugout canoe carved from a wild cashew (espavé) tree. The boat is outfitted with a motor, but he wields a long pole that he uses to push us out of the shallows like a loinclothed gondolier. Toucans fly overhead, and impossibly blue morpho butterflies glide on the breeze. (Rios tells me they’re not actually blue, but simply reflecting the sky off minuscule scales on their wings.) Along the way, we pass thatch-roofed houses set back among the trees. Soon we spot a welcome party playing flutes and drums, and we disembark and climb up stairs to the hilltop village Emberá Drua.
The open-air dwellings here house some 23 families, comprising about 130 people, and the village is a fascinating mix of old and new. Yes, the town square still includes a cepo, or stocks, where citizens who misbehave must sit with their limbs restrained, but there’s a school with a teacher who travels in from the city and lives on-site during the week, and the villagers choose the chief—who can be a man or a woman— democratically. “You can get a cell signal up at the top of the hill,” Rios tells me. “The last time I was up there, we ran into some teenagers sitting around a phone watching YouTube videos.”
We’re joined by a large collection of elderly German tourists and a quartet of Jamaican women who change into customary tribal costumes as soon as they’re given the chance. As I shop for tiny baskets and animals carved out of tagua nut (aka vegetable ivory), members of the tribe offer to give us temporary tattoos made from jagua, a henna-like fruit extract that can last up to two weeks. I take a pass, but I’m happily surprised at how quickly the German 70-somethings are rolling up their sleeves to be marked with the intricate geometric patterns.
During an ensuing display of symbolism-laden ritual dances, the Jamaican women get in the spirit and pair off with male tribe members. One of them catches my eye, laughs, and says, “We’re not going back to Jamaica!”
Before we leave, cooks bring out fresh-caught tilapia and plantains that have been fried to a crisp over an open wood fire. The food is served simply in a banana leaf, which is folded roughly into the shape of an envelope; the fish is probably the best I’ve ever tasted.
Next, Rios drives me to the Amador Causeway, a 3.7-mile road built with rocks excavated during the construction of the canal. The causeway links a chain of small islands at the mouth of the waterway, and the showstopper along the way is the Biomuseo, Frank Gehry’s Latin American debut and an ode to biodiversity. Opened in 2014, the museum looks a bit like Gehry’s other grand Deconstructivist institutions (the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao), but in place of his trademark curving sheets of steel the architect has gone maximalist. A crayon box of colorful panels is meant to evoke the wild exuberance of the neotropical habitat here, but it looks to me more like a tumble of cargo ship containers. Maybe I’ve been next to the canal for too long.
I can still appreciate Panama’s biodiversity, though. In many ways, this little country is the linchpin of all life in the Americas: about 3 million years ago, the isthmus emerged from the sea, effectively bridging the gap between the continents and allowing for the two-way migration of plants and animals. The museum’s centerpiece is the Worlds Collide hall, in which life-size models of both extinct and living creatures—giant armadillos, flightless terror birds—seem to stampede through the gallery. I head outside, and, as if to prove the exhibition’s point, the grounds are teeming with leaf-cutter ants, parakeets, and iguanas.
A 20-minute cab ride brings me back to the city just in time for dinner at Maito, the first Central American restaurant to appear on the Latin America’s 50 Best Restaurants list. (It’s currently riding high at number six.) Here, chef Mario Castrellón serves a tasting menu that lovingly reinterprets simple dishes from across the country.
I settle in with a Panamanian rum co*cktail, and the friendly sommelier, Dixie Martínez, brings over a bowl of sancocho, an herbaceous chicken soup. “You take it at after-parties,” she says. “If you go to a wedding, they’ll bring it out around 1 a.m. It revives your soul.” A shrimp wonton with coconut curry, meanwhile, is an Indo-Caribbean spin on dim sum, made popular by the country’s sizable ethnic Chinese community.
Before dessert, a server comes out with a cart and begins making pour-over coffee with Geisha beans, displaying the precision of a lab technician. “My suggestion is no milk, no sugar,” he says reverently, and I can see why: It’s light-bodied and floral, with notes of jasmine and gardenia, and it tastes more of tea than coffee.
The best of the desserts is a spin on the corn-based morning dish torrejitas de maíz—this version a corn choux pastry filled with sweet cheese and topped with smoked corn leaf ice cream and a crème anglaise of corn and chombo chili. “We’re ending this tasting menu with breakfast,” Martínez says, “so you can start all over again.”
I savor my last bite, once again charmed by the ways Panamanians elevate and remix the most humble parts of their culture. As the capital city rises skyward like some Central American Dubai, it’s heartening to know that there are people working to keep this beautiful place grounded.
Plan on Panama: Nonstop flights to Panama depart up to three times per day from Houston Intercontinental and up to two times per day from New York/Newark, with one-stop service from dozens of other cities.
