Panamá

Más allá de la capital, las principales ciudades son Colón, David, La Chorrera — cada una un centro de cultura regional, economía e historia. Panama City is Central America's only true skyscraper city — a financial centre of glass towers visible from the Pacific whose economy since 1903 has been organised around the canal that the United States built, controlled until 1977, and finally transferred to Panamanian sovereignty in 1999 in a handover that Panamanians celebrate as their defining national achievement.

El idioma oficial es español, que refleja el patrimonio cultural del país y lo conecta con una amplia comunidad internacional. Internacionalmente, Panamá se contacta mediante el código +507. Panamanians built a national identity around the canal — the 77-kilometre waterway that allows a ship to move between oceans in 8-10 hours rather than the 20,000-kilometre Cape Horn route — while managing the extraordinary ethnic diversity created by the canal's labour recruitment: Antillean workers from Barbados and Jamaica, Chinese workers, and immigrants from South America and Europe creating one of the Americas' most mixed populations.

Panamá comparte sus fronteras con Costa Rica, Colombia. El tráfico rodado circula por la derecha, en consonancia con la convención de

La vida económica y cotidiana se rige por la zona horaria de UTC-05:00, alineando el país con sus vecinos regionales.

Sancocho — a slow-simmered chicken soup with ñame (yam), otoe (taro), corn, and culantro herb — is Panama's national dish, eaten on Sunday after church and at family gatherings in a preparation that crosses ethnic lines as the comfort food of a diverse country, with the specific herb combination (culantro, not cilantro) distinguishing Panamanian sancocho from the similar soups of its Central American neighbours.

Baseball is Panama's dominant sport rather than football — a legacy of American canal zone culture that produced Roberto Durán (boxing, considered one of the greatest fighters in history) and Mariano Rivera (baseball, Baseball Hall of Fame), two athletes who became cultural heroes representing Panama's capacity to produce world-class competition talent from a country of 4 million.

The Darien Gap — the 87-kilometre break in the Pan-American Highway between Panama and Colombia — is one of the world's most ecologically intact tropical wilderness areas, a combination of rainforest, swamp, and coastal ecosystems that has resisted road building for 60 years, sheltering harpy eagles, jaguars, and the indigenous Emberá and Guna communities whose territorial rights the road's absence inadvertently protects.