Panamá Viejo (1519 Ruins), Frank Gehry's Biomuseo & Amador Causeway Guide

Two landmarks at opposite ends of the Bay of Panama frame the geographical and historical story of the capital: in the east, the sixteenth-century masonry ruins of Panamá Viejo where European colonization on the Pacific coast began; in the west, the six-kilometre Amador Causeway and Biomuseo, built out of rock carved from the Continental Divide.

Panamá Viejo: The 1519 Pacific settlement and Cathedral Tower

Founded on 15 August 1519 by Spanish governor Pedrarias Dávila near an indigenous Cueva fishing village, Nuestra Señora de la Asunción de Panamá served for 152 years as the royal treasury port where gold and silver shipped north from Inca Peru were loaded onto mule trains bound for Portobelo. On 28 January 1671, as Welsh privateer Henry Morgan marched across the isthmus from Fort San Lorenzo, the Spanish governor ordered the gunpowder magazines blown up, triggering a fire that consumed the city; rather than rebuild on the open plain, the crown relocated the capital to Casco Antiguo in 1673.

Today protected as a 28-hectare UNESCO World Heritage archaeological park, Panamá Viejo is best explored by starting at the air-conditioned Museo de la Plaza Mayor, which displays pre-Columbian goldwork, indigenous funerary urns, and a detailed scale model of the 1670 city. Outside, electric park shuttles and shaded paths link the stone arches of the Convent of the Conceptionists (Convento de la Concepción), the Bishop's House, the Casas Reales, and the 30-metre Cathedral Tower, whose internal wooden staircase climbs to a rooftop viewing platform facing the glass towers of Costa del Este. Check the official Patronato Panamá Viejo site before visiting, as the park closes on Mondays.

Frank Gehry's Biomuseo and the Amador Causeway (Calzada de Amador)

At the western entrance to the bay stretches the Amador Causeway, a six-kilometre rock breakwater built between 1913 and 1914 from basalt excavated out of the Culebra Cut to keep cross-currents from silting up the Pacific channel of the Panama Canal. Linking the mainland to four small islands, Naos, Perico, Culebra, and Flamenco, the causeway features a palm-lined cycling and walking promenade with views of ships passing beneath the Bridge of the Americas on one side and the downtown skyline on the other.

Near the start of the causeway rises the Biomuseo (opened in 2014), the only building in Latin America designed by architect Frank Gehry (whose wife, Berta Aguilera, is Panamanian). Beneath an angular canopy of bright red, blue, yellow, and green metal panels inspired by tropical plumage and corrugated canal roofs, eight permanent galleries created with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) dramatise how the volcanic rise of the Isthmus of Panama three million years ago split the oceans, launched the Gulf Stream, and allowed mammoths, sabre-toothed cats, and giant ground sloths to cross between North and South America during the Great American Biotic Interchange. Further out on Culebra Island, stop at STRI's open-air Punta Culebra Nature Center to see marine touch pools and wild sloths resting in shoreline trees.