Panama City's culture runs from carved colonial gold to Frank Gehry's clashing metal roof. Three days here take in the country's only contemporary art museum, a 1908 opera house with painted ceilings, Guna mola textiles and the jazz clubs of Casco Viejo.
Panama's only contemporary art museum sits in a 1930s Masonic lodge on Ancón hill. Two floors rotate Panamanian and isthmian painting, video and installation, with works by Brooke Alfaro and Trixie Briceño. Open Tue–Sun 09:00–16:00.
Frank Gehry's only building in Latin America: a crashed pile of red, yellow and blue steel plates at the Causeway entrance. Eight galleries designed by Bruce Mau explain how the isthmus rose and split two oceans. Tue–Sun 10:00–16:00.
A 1756 merchant's house, one of few timber-and-stone survivors of Casco Viejo's fires. The ground floor hosts free rotating shows by Panamanian painters and photographers; upstairs keeps period furniture and a small colonial gallery.
The golden baroque altar the friars supposedly whitewashed to hide it from Henry Morgan in 1671, then carried here from the ruined old city. Mahogany sheathed in gold leaf, three storeys tall, still lit for evening mass at 18:00.
Panama's 1908 opera house, reopened after a 2020 restoration: horseshoe boxes, a Venetian chandelier and a ceiling fresco of the birth of the nation by Roberto Lewis. Daytime visits run when no rehearsal occupies the stage.
Housed in a former mission chapel on Calle 24, this museum tells the story of the West Indian labourers from Barbados, Jamaica and Martinique who dug the Canal: work contracts, dominoes, a recreated tenement room and calypso records.
The Mola Museum on the Amador Causeway shows Guna reverse-appliqué panels as fine art: layered cotton cut back to reveal geometric and animal designs, hung on dark walls with a Guna-language soundscape. Wed–Sun 10:00–17:00.
Grammy-winning pianist Danilo Pérez's room on the ground floor of the American Trade Hotel. Panamanian jazz, Cuban descarga and túmbao trios most nights from 20:00, on a small stage with fewer than seventy seats around it.
The old YMCA hall in Balboa is Panama's craft market: over a hundred stalls of Guna molas, Ngäbe chácaras net bags, Emberá cocobolo carvings and woven chunga palm plates, sold by the artisan families themselves rather than resellers.
Panama's Chinatown, founded by Canal railway labourers from Guangdong in the 1850s, sits behind a red arch off Avenida Central. Herbalists, roast-pork counters and a loud bargaining market spill along the pedestrian strip beside it.
The national anthropology museum holds pre-Columbian gold from Sitio Conte, Coclé polychrome ceramics and carved stone metates, alongside ethnographic rooms on the Guna, Emberá and Ngäbe peoples. Named for its founding anthropologist.
Three replica villages on the wooded flank of Cerro Ancón: an Azuero colonial plaza with tiled roofs and a bell tower, an Afro-Antillean row of clapboard houses, and Guna and Emberá dwellings with craft workshops attached.