Page 73 - The Rough Guide to Panama (Travel Guide)

Panamá Viejo Panama City 71
You’ll need some imagination to reconstruct the neglected ruins of sixteenth-century 1
Panamá La Vieja, or PANAMÁ VIEJO, as it’s more often called, which was once the
premier colonial city on the isthmus (see box below). Yet while there’s no comparison
with the magnificent Maya sites elsewhere in Central America, the view from the bell
tower alone makes a half-day visit worthwhile.

Museo del Sitio de Panamá la Vieja
The Museo del Sitio de Panamá la Vieja, with some summaries in English, should be
your first port of call. The top floor displays items discovered during excavations, which
are described in greater detail on the ground floor. There are some exquisitely preserved
pre-Columbian artefacts – though labels are often frustratingly absent – together with
pottery, coins and utensils from colonial times, and a useful interactive scale model of
the city in 1671.

The convents
Outside the museum, you can backtrack 100m to peer over at the Puente del Matadero
(“Bridge of the Slaughterhouse”), named after the neighbouring abattoir, which
marked the western limit of the old city. Returning east along the shoreline, continue
along the gravel path a few hundred metres past extensive mud flats being probed by
hundreds of migrating waders. Passing the scarcely visible or recognizable Iglesia y
Convento de la Merced – which survived Morgan’s assault and was relocated to Casco
Viejo – and the Iglesia y Convento de San Francisco, cross the road and turn east down
Calle de la Empedrada. To the left stands the well-preserved Iglesia del Convento de la
Concepción, the city’s only convent for women, built in 1597. Look over the nearby
wall and you’ll find the impressive remains of the convent’s seventeenth-century
reservoir. The tour continues past the skeletal remnants of the Jesuit Iglesia y Convento
de la Compañia de Jesús before reaching the Cincuentenario.

Plaza Mayor
The vast open space of the Plaza Mayor is overlooked by the imposing cathedral bell
tower, one of Panama’s most distinctive landmarks. The view from the top allows you to
appreciate the city’s former grandeur. The plaza was the social hub of the city, hosting
events from political rallies to bullfights, and surrounded by the most prestigious

PANAMÁ VIEJO’S TREASURE TRAIL
Nuestra Señora de la Asunción de Panamá, to give Panamá Viejo its full name, was
established in 1519 by the infamous Pedro arias de ávila. Despite the surprisingly swampy
location, Panama City prospered as the Pacific terminal of the Spanish Crown’s treasure trail,
sending silks and spices from the east and plundered silver and gold from Peru to europe via
the isthmus. By the early seventeenth century, it boasted an impressive cathedral, seven
convents, numerous churches, a hospital, two hundred warehouses and around five thousand
houses. Being on the crucial trade route necessitated the construction of a huge customs
house, a treasury and a mint; these were built in the most heavily fortified area of the Casas
Reales (Royal Houses), the symbol of the Spanish Crown’s might, originally separated from the
rest of the city by a moat and wooden palisade.
Following the Welsh pirate Henry morgan’s sacking of the city in 1671 (see p.293), the place
was razed to the ground. Little more than a pile of rubble now remains of these once
impressive buildings – some of the original stones were quarried for construction of the new
city, after which the site was largely neglected – but the Iglesia del Convento de la
Concepción and the cathedral bell tower have been restored.

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