Plaza de Francia

This guide to Plaza de Francia in Panama City opens with a question: what does it take to be right for twenty years before anyone listens. Bronze statues of Ferdinand de Lesseps and his engineers, confident the Suez Canal's success would repeat here, dominate the square, but the guide turns to a smaller bust set apart, honoring Cuban doctor Carlos Finlay. You'll hear how Finlay stood before Havana's medical academy in 1881 and was laughed off the stage for claiming yellow fever spread by mosquito bite, not dirty air, while French laborers here died by the thousands from a killer almost no one suspected. Read the stone tablets behind the obelisk, recording some twenty two thousand names.