Convento de Santo Domingo

This guide to the Convento de Santo Domingo in Panama City opens with a Dominican friar kneeling beneath his own half-built flat brick arch after two earlier attempts had already collapsed, praying as workers pulled out the wooden supports holding it up. It traces how the friars, who arrived in 1571, built a nave with no interior pillars and cut chapels straight into the stone walls instead, and how fire gutted the church twice without ever bringing the arch down. You'll hear why engineers weighing an interoceanic canal took note of how well this ground held. Stand beneath the arch itself to see the brickwork the friars trusted with nothing but their hands.