Los Santos

The pollera's elaborate cross-stitch embroidery, worked entirely by hand onto fine cotton or linen, is what sets it apart from simpler regional folk dress elsewhere in Latin America — a single high-quality pollera can take an artisan several months of steady work to complete, and a full formal set includes gold jewellery, hair combs and pom-poms specific to the tradition, an investment families often build over years rather than buying outright for one occasion. Los Santos is where the dress originated and remains the region most closely associated with making it, and while polleras are worn at festivals nationwide, seeing the dress in its home province, on the artisans who still hand-embroider them, is a genuinely different experience from spotting one at a Panama City event.

Las Tablas's carnival is built around a rivalry unlike most carnival traditions elsewhere — the town splits into two competing halves, Calle Arriba (Upper Street) and Calle Abajo (Lower Street), each fielding its own queen, floats, music trucks (culecos) and water-soaked street parties, competing directly against each other for the more spectacular celebration rather than presenting a single unified parade. The rivalry, generations old, turns the days leading up to Ash Wednesday into one of Latin America's largest carnival gatherings, drawing visitors from across Panama and increasingly from abroad, with polleras appearing throughout the festivities as a proud display of the region's own craft alongside the carnival's usual music and costume.

In La Villa de Los Santos, Corpus Christi celebrations centre on the Diablicos Sucios — dancers in horned masks and boldly patterned black-and-white or red costumes performing choreographed routines with roots in colonial-era religious festival traditions, one of several distinct devil-mask dance traditions found across Panama's interior provinces. On the coast, Pedasí offers a genuinely different Los Santos experience: a small fishing town turned low-key beach and surf destination, with boat trips out to Isla Iguana Wildlife Refuge for a resident frigatebird colony and snorkelling over one of Panama's more accessible coral reefs — a practical pairing with the province's inland festival culture rather than a separate trip.