Old Town

This guide to Old Town in Panama City starts with something you can watch from the seawall at Las Bovedas: tides that swing more than seventeen feet, exposing the bay floor twice a day. It traces why that mattered to the Spanish, who lost the first Panama City to the pirate Henry Morgan in sixteen seventy-one and rebuilt on this water-ringed peninsula two years later. You'll hear about the vaulted dungeons beneath today's promenade and the reef that vanishes and reappears with the tide. Stand at the seawall at low tide for the clearest sense of the defense the ocean itself once provided.