Old Panama

This guide to Old Panama in Panama City centers on January 1671, when the Welsh privateer Henry Morgan marched fourteen hundred men out of the jungle and took the city in a single afternoon, which then burned for four weeks straight. You'll hear the unresolved argument over who set the fire, Morgan's raiders or the Spanish governor, and why a city of roughly ten thousand people built mostly of wood and thatch went up so fast. The guide traces this bell tower's own history, rebuilt in stone between 1619 and 1626 after three earlier wooden churches rotted or burned. Climb its hundred and fifteen steps and look out over what the fire left behind.