Miraflores Locks

This guide to the Miraflores Locks in Panama City opens with engineer Harry Hodges in 1907, moving the canal's planned locks two miles inland from Sosa Hill to keep them out of range of a warship's guns. Standing inside that decision, you'll hear why the gates here rise taller than anywhere else on the canal, built for a Pacific tide that can swing twenty feet in a day, and how chief engineer Edward Schildhauer's electric mules were designed to tow ships through without a hull ever touching concrete. The guide also follows the gravity-fed water system pulling from Gatun Lake, eighty-five feet above sea level, down through culverts built into the lock walls. Watch from the observation deck as a ship rides that same drop today.