Panama City has been sacked, rebuilt and rebuilt again. Walk the scorched stone of the 1519 settlement, the 1673 walled replacement, the French cemetery of a failed canal, and the American Zone that Panama took back in 1999.
The 1619 cathedral tower is the tallest survivor of the settlement Welsh privateer Henry Morgan destroyed in January 1671. Climb the internal stairs for a view over the mangroves and the modern skyline. Site open Tue–Sun 08:00–16:30.
The best-preserved private house in Panamá Viejo, Casa Alarcón shows the two-storey merchant layout of the 1600s. Next door, the nuns' convent held the settlement's Spanish-born women, evacuated by sea before Morgan arrived.
Six halls covering the isthmus before Balboa: pre-Columbian gold from Gran Coclé, burial urns, and the 1519 founding by Pedrarias Dávila. Scale models reconstruct the city as it stood the night it burned.
Built around 1617 and still standing, this stone bridge carried the Camino Real — the mule road that hauled Peruvian silver across the isthmus to Portobelo. It is among the oldest surviving bridges in the Americas.
Housed in the 1875 Grand Hotel where the French Canal company kept its offices, this museum covers Ferdinand de Lesseps' 1881 failure, the 1903 separation from Colombia and the 1977 Torrijos-Carter Treaties. Tue–Sun 09:00–17:00.
Obelisk and marble tablets honour the roughly 22,000 workers who died of yellow fever and malaria during the French attempt. Behind them, Las Bóvedas are the Spanish sea-wall dungeons that flooded at high tide.
The mola gallery documents Guna textile art and the 1925 Guna revolution against Panamanian assimilation policy. The bougainvillea-covered promenade beside it is named for the general who backed the 1903 independence.
The presidential palace keeps herons in its courtyard since 1922. Nearby San José holds the baroque golden altar that a priest supposedly painted over to hide it from Morgan's men in 1671 — the church's founding legend.
In a former Christian mission chapel on Calle 24, this museum tells the story of the West Indian labourers — mainly Barbadian and Jamaican — who built the 1855 railway and the Canal, and the segregated gold/silver pay rolls.
The 1914 headquarters of the Canal, on Balboa Heights, has a rotunda of murals by William Van Ingen showing the excavation of Culebra Cut. Free to enter on weekdays; the ceiling paintings are unretouched originals.
Cobbles of the Spanish colonial mule road survive inside Parque Nacional Camino de Cruces, the route silver took between the Pacific and Chagres River. Signposted sections start near the Madden Road entrance.
Nearly 5,500 graves of Canal Zone workers, US soldiers and their families, maintained by the American Battle Monuments Commission. The headstones read as a demographic record of the Zone from 1914 to the 1999 handover.