Panama Travel Guide

The Miraflores Locks visitor centre lets you watch container ships rise 85 feet through the original 1914 locks; Agua Clara on the Caribbean side shows the 2016 Neopanamax expansion. Partial transit cruises (4–6 hours) and full-day full transits are offered by Pacific Queen, Panama Marine Adventures and the Panama Canal Authority. The Panama Canal Museum in Casco Viejo gives the historical context — French failure (1881–89), US construction (1904–14), 1999 handover.

Casco Viejo is Panama's UNESCO-listed Spanish colonial old town, founded 1673 after pirates destroyed Panama Viejo. Restored over the past two decades into one of Latin America's most photogenic quarters: rooftop bars, boutique hotels in former tenements, San José Church's golden altar, Plaza de Independencia, Teatro Nacional. Panama City's modern Marbella and Punta Pacífica districts add the financial-centre skyline.

The San Blas archipelago — officially Guna Yala — comprises 365 Caribbean islands, 49 of them inhabited, governed autonomously by the indigenous Guna people since 1938. Thatched-cabin overnight stays on small islands, Guna village visits, and turquoise-water island-hopping. Reached by 30-minute small-aircraft flights from Panama City to airstrips at El Porvenir or Cartí. Cash-only (USD), basic facilities, no resorts — the indigenous community caps tourism deliberately.

Bocas del Toro is Panama's western Caribbean archipelago near the Costa Rican border, a backpacker and surfer hub anchored on Isla Colón with Afro-Caribbean Creole culture, thatched water-bungalows and reef-protected snorkel beaches. Surf breaks at Bluff Beach, Paunch and Silverbacks; island-hopping to Red Frog Beach, Zapatilla Cays, Dolphin Bay. Reached by short flight from Panama City or 10-hour bus to Almirante plus water taxi.

Boquete sits at 1,200 metres in the Chiriquí highlands, with cloud forests, coffee plantations and a large North American expat community drawn by the Pensionado visa. Volcán Barú (3,475 m), Panama's highest peak, is the only spot in the country where both oceans are visible on a clear morning — a 6–8 hour pre-dawn hike. Coffee tours at Café Ruiz, Kotowa, Hacienda La Esmeralda (Geisha origin); Los Quetzales Trail in the cloud forest.

Panama records more bird species than the US and Canada combined — over 970 — and protects roughly a third of its territory. Soberanía National Park, twenty minutes from Panama City, hosts the Pipeline Road birdwatching trail; Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute's Barro Colorado Island offers regulated rainforest visits in the canal lake; Coiba National Park on the Pacific is a UNESCO marine reserve with whale-shark and humpback-whale seasons, reached by boat from the Pacific surf town of Santa Catalina, which also draws board-riders in its own right. The Darién rainforest east of the canal is one of the planet's last great wildernesses, accessible only with professional operators.