Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church

This guide to Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church in Panama City follows a wooden altarpiece carved in Barcelona by Claudio Rius and shipped to the tropics when the church went up on Via Espana in the 1940s. It traces how Panama's humidity and insects slowly ate through the gilded wood over three decades, and the moment by 1981 when the friars called in a Spanish craftsman to answer the climate with something it couldn't destroy. It also follows the twin spires, built in the image of fourteenth-century Toledo.