🇵🇦 Panama
Panama City
Panama City is the capital of Panama and the only city in the world where you can see the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans simultaneously from a single viewpoint — the Miraflores Locks viewing platform of the Panama Canal gives you both bodies of water in one panorama. The city of 1.5 million is unique in Central America as a financial and banking hub (the 50+ skyscrapers of the modern Punta Paitilla district are visible from the 400-year-old ruins of Panama Viejo), the gateway to the world's most important maritime shortcut (the Canal handles 3–5% of world trade), and the site of the most remarkable pre-Columbian ruins in Central America accessible by public transit. Panama City was actually founded twice: first as Panama La Vieja in 1519 (the first permanent European settlement on the Pacific coast of the Americas, destroyed by Henry Morgan's pirate attack in 1671) and then as the current city (Casco Viejo, or San Felipe) in 1673, rebuilt 2 km west on a more defensible peninsula — giving the city two historic centres for the price of one. Casco Viejo (UNESCO 2003) is a crumbling-but-rapidly-gentrifying colonial district of French, Spanish and Republican-era architecture surrounding plazas where the Panamanian national anthem was first played and the Declaration of Independence from Colombia was read in 1903 — for it was here that Panama separated from Colombia with American support in order to allow the Canal to be built. The Canal itself (opened 1914, expanded with new locks in 2016) remains the most extraordinary feat of engineering in the Americas.