Plaza Simón Bolívar

This guide to Plaza Simón Bolívar in Panama City begins in nineteen twenty-six, when President Rodolfo Chiari unveiled a bronze statue of Simón Bolívar that was missing its four relief panels and its flag-bearing figures for Argentina, Chile, Bolivia and Colombia. It follows the Spanish sculptor Mariano Benlliure, hired for a fee more than double what Panama had paid for its Balboa monument, and the falling-out over payment that left his finished bronze crated in a Madrid workshop. The plaza itself was once Plaza San Francisco, emptied by a fire in seventeen fifty-six that burned fifty houses nobody rebuilt.