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Panama City
Panama's capital, a glass skyline beside the canal
Panama City rises in a wall of glass towers at the Pacific mouth of the canal that splits the Americas, a tropical capital that has grown into the banking and shipping hub of Central America. More than two million people live in its metropolitan area, strung along the Pacific coast beside the waterway whose tolls and trade have made the city rich. It is the political and financial center of Panama, a place where colonial ruins, a restored Spanish old town, and a startlingly modern skyline trace five centuries of strategic importance.
The city sits on the Pacific coast at the southern entrance to the Panama Canal, on a narrow isthmus where only some 80 kilometers of land separate the world's two great oceans. The land is low and tropical, fringed by mangroves and bays, with the forested hills of the canal watershed rising inland. The canal itself, an engineering marvel cut through the continental divide using a system of locks and the artificial Gatún Lake, defines the city's economy and geography alike. A hot, humid climate and a pronounced wet season govern life in the lowland tropics here.
The Spanish founded Panamá la Vieja in 1519 as the first European city on the Pacific coast of the Americas, a transit point for the silver of Peru, until the privateer Henry Morgan sacked and burned it in 1671. The Spanish rebuilt nearby in the walled district now called Casco Viejo. The city languished until the canal, completed by the United States in 1914, made the isthmus one of the most strategic places on Earth. When Panama took full control of the canal in 1999, the tolls fueled a building boom. Today Panama City is a glittering financial center astride global trade.