Paseo de Las Bóvedas

This guide to Paseo de las Bóvedas in Panama City starts inside a wine glass and ends somewhere darker: the stone vaults built into the seawall here spent most of their history as a dungeon. Spanish engineers cut seven chambers into the fortress wall starting in 1759 to guard the city from pirates, chambers that later served as barracks, storerooms and cells for a century and a half. Among the prisoners held here was Victoriano Lorenzo, an indigenous guerrilla leader who fought for the poor and was executed on the plaza just outside in 1903. Walk the seawall slowly; the chambers keep their old thickness even where the use has changed.