Panama City

The word Panama predates any Spanish presence on the isthmus by an unknown span of time. When Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed to the Pacific in 1513, he encountered Cueva settlements along the coast whose people used a name his men transcribed as Panama. The most persistent reading, developed by the historian Kathleen Romoli in the 1950s, treats the word as Cueva for a place abundant with fish. No written Cueva source survives the conquest, so every etymology rests on 16th-century Spanish transcriptions of an oral language.

Pedrarias Dávila founded the Spanish city of Panama on August 15, 1519, making it the first permanent European settlement on the Pacific coast of the Americas. The city became the staging point for Francisco Pizarro's conquest of the Inca Empire in 1532, and for the next century tons of Peruvian gold and silver passed through its warehouses on their way to Spain. Old Panama was among the wealthiest cities in the Spanish Americas, which made it a target.

In January 1671, the Welsh privateer Henry Morgan led approximately 1,200 men across the isthmus and sacked the city. The Spanish burned what Morgan's men had not already destroyed and relocated the settlement three miles to the southwest in 1673, founding what is now the Casco Viejo district. The ruins of the original city, known as Panama Viejo, were designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997. The designation is unique in the Americas: it covers both a ruined colonial city and its living replacement in the same inscription.

The United States completed the Panama Canal in 1914, embedding a strip of American territory across the isthmus until December 31, 1999, when Panama reclaimed full sovereignty over the canal zone. The glass towers that now define Panama City's Pacific skyline rose almost entirely after that handover. The Cueva name that once meant abundant fish now marks one of Latin America's principal financial centers.