This week’s travel dream: Panama City’s historic heart

The rumpled charm of Panama City’s oldest neighborhood won’t stay secret much longer, said Stephen Drucker in Travel + Leisure. Casco Viejo “is having that moment I always seem to just miss”—when something’s happening but “it hasn’t quite happened.” Among my “fashion-barometer” friends, Panama is a recognized hot spot whose boom times began when the nation gained control of its transcontinental canal in 1999. Since then, a forest of slick skyscrapers has sprung up in Panama City, giving this port a sophisticated look reminiscent of Singapore or Dubai. But colonial-era Casco Viejo feels a world apart.

The Casco is a small neighborhood overlooking the canal’s Pacific Ocean entrance. A UNESCO World Heritage site, it’s packed with grand houses repurposed as hotels, makeshift scaffolding holding up pastel façades, and “trees growing through former ballrooms.” The atmosphere is “erotic like Havana, moldering like New Orleans, world-weary like Cuernavaca, Mexico, and just dangerous enough, like Miami’s South Beach in its early years.” This draws a diverse group of people. Walk down a street and you’ll run across surfers, ecotourists, “expats of many nationalities,” and street vendors selling—what else?—Panama hats. Developers are busy in the Casco too, but their apparent aim is to “polish up the Casco while keeping it from becoming one more could-be-anywhere stop on the global fabulousness circuit.”

That won’t be easy. With various high-

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profile hotels and the Frank Gehry–designed Museum of Biodiversity scheduled to open soon nearby, tourists will “surely be coming to the Casco in greater numbers in the next few years.” The old neighborhood will struggle to hold on to its uniqueness, and “at some point the rough edges are going to be smoothed out.” In a few years, you might not find any more bars like La Casona—“down a dark, dead-end street in a derelict old building, where you can drop in for a mojito with a hundred other people if you’re still up at 4 a.m.” Some of my trendy friends may want to wait for the sanitized version, but right now is the time that a real traveler “will look back on wistfully.”

At Casco Viejo’s Canal House (canalhousepanama.com), doubles start at $195.