Miraflores Locks
Why this is the first thing I do every time I land in Panama.
Read MoreBoquete’s cloud forest
A closer look at one of Panama's most rewarding experiences.
Read MoreSan Blas islands
Where to go next once you have seen the headline sights of Panama.
Read MorePanama surprised me the first time I visited, arriving expecting little beyond the canal and finding instead a country of extraordinary biodiversity squeezed between two oceans. I’ve watched container ships thread through the Miraflores Locks, a piece of engineering still astonishing more than a century after it opened, and I’ve hiked cloud forest trails in Boquete the next morning with quetzals calling somewhere in the canopy. Panama City itself splits neatly between a gleaming financial skyline and Casco Viejo’s crumbling colonial charm, balconies and bougainvillea over cobblestones. Off both coasts, the San Blas islands and Bocas del Toro offer entirely different registers of Caribbean and Pacific island life. Few countries let you move between such distinct worlds within a single week.
Chapter One
The canal and the capital
Watching a ship rise through the Miraflores Locks never loses its appeal, the sheer scale of it dwarfing whatever vessel happens to be passing through that day. The visitor center does a fair job explaining the engineering, but I prefer sitting at the restaurant terrace with a coffee and simply watching the process unfold in real time. Back in the city, Casco Viejo rewards an evening stroll, its restored plazas filled with jazz bars and rooftop restaurants overlooking the bay, the modern skyline glittering just across the water as a backdrop. It’s a striking juxtaposition, colonial stone in the foreground and glass towers behind it.
“Panama proves that a small country can hold an entire continent’s worth of contrast.”
Chapter Two
Highlands and islands
Boquete, tucked into the highlands near Volcán Barú, produces some of the finest coffee I’ve tasted anywhere, grown at altitude in rich volcanic soil, and the surrounding cloud forest trails offer genuine quiet after the capital’s bustle. On the Caribbean side, Bocas del Toro trades mountains for mangroves and reef, a scattering of islands connected by water taxi where the pace slows considerably. The San Blas archipelago, home to the Guna people, offers yet another version of paradise, hundreds of small islands governed by an indigenous comarca that has largely kept development at bay, palm-covered sandbars barely bigger than a boat’s length.
The Short List
Do not miss in Panama
At a glance
Panama in numbers
- Capital
- Panama City
- Language
- Spanish
- Currency
- Balboa / US Dollar (PAB/USD)
- Best time
- December to April
Did you know
Panama is the only place in the world where you can see the sun rise on the Pacific and set on the Atlantic.