Ancon Hill

This guide to Ancon Hill in Panama City traces a modest 653-foot summit that decided outsized things: pirate scouts used it as a lookout in 1671, and American canal engineers later quarried its own rock to build the locks and buildings below. An obelisk on the summit honors George Washington Goethals, the engineer who finished the canal, built from the same stone the hill gave up. For seventy-three years the hill sat inside the fenced-off Canal Zone, visible to Panamanians from their rooftops but off-limits to them. Stand on the summit path and look for where the quarrying scars the slope below.