A Weekend in Panama City, Offbeat
Two days in Panama City means picking a fight with the calendar and mostly winning, provided you accept upfront that Panama Viejo is getting cut. There’s no honest way to fit the canal, the old town, and a second ruin site several kilometers away into 48 hours without turning the trip into a taxi tour of parking lots. The 3-day version adds Panama Viejo back in if you can spare the extra day.
Book these before you go
- Miraflores Visitor Center entry : book online, dry-season mornings fill the viewing rail fast.
- A Casco Viejo hotel : boutique room inventory is small, book ahead for weekends.
- A rooftop dinner reservation: call ahead for Friday or Saturday, tables in the old town go fast.
The two days at a glance
| Day | Focus |
|---|---|
| 1 | Casco Viejo, Mercado de Mariscos, Ancon Hill |
| 2 | Miraflores Canal, Amador Causeway, Biomuseo |
Day 1: Casco Viejo, properly
Spend the morning in Casco Viejo, the restored colonial quarter, not to be confused with Panama Viejo, the older ruin site across town you’re skipping this trip. Wander Plaza de la Independencia, poke into Iglesia de San José for the gold-leaf altar locals claim was disguised in mud to hide it from pirates centuries ago, and let the cobblestones do the rest of the work.
Lunch at Mercado de Mariscos, a five-minute walk from the plazas, where a cup of fresh ceviche runs $3 to $8 and outclasses anything served two blocks away with a tablecloth. In the afternoon, climb Ancon Hill: 30 to 45 minutes on foot, free, and the best panoramic view in the city, canal, skyline, and rainforest canopy all from one lookout, with a decent chance of spotting a toucan on the way up. Dinner back in Casco Viejo, ideally on a rooftop, runs $25 to $40 for the view tax, or $5 to $8 at a local fonda if you’d rather save the splurge.
Is skipping Panama Viejo on a 2-day trip actually fine?
Yes. It’s a genuinely separate 1519 ruin site several kilometers from Casco Viejo, burned by Henry Morgan in 1671, and worth an hour on a longer trip, but two days doesn’t have the room without cutting something better. The 3-day itinerary fits it in properly.
Day 2: The canal and the causeway
Head to Miraflores in the morning, not Agua Clara, which sits on the opposite coast near Colon and isn’t a sane add-on to a two-day trip. Miraflores has the biggest visitor center, four viewing decks, a proper museum, and an IMAX theater, and runs $17 to $20 for a non-resident adult ticket; go early before the tour buses arrive and the deck rail gets three people deep.
From there, head to Amador Causeway for lunch with a marina view and a stop at the Biomuseo , Frank Gehry’s biodiversity museum, where the grounds and Level One are free even if you skip the paid galleries. Spend the rest of the afternoon walking the causeway before heading back for dinner in Marbella or El Cangrejo, the modern business district that feels less like a movie set and more like where Panama City actually lives.
Getting around
Uber is the default here and it’s not close: cheaper than street taxis, no haggling, no guessing what the fare should be. The Metro covers Lines 1 and 2, both genuinely useful for getting across downtown fast, but Line 3 is still under construction and running test trips only, not carrying passengers in 2026, so don’t build a plan around it existing yet. Casco Viejo itself is the one part of the city built for walking; everywhere else, treat a car as the default rather than the backup plan.
Money and a couple of things worth knowing
Panama runs on the US dollar day to day; the balboa exists alongside it pegged 1:1 but only as coins, there’s no balboa paper money to hunt down and no exchange rate to calculate. Tap water is safe to drink, which surprises people expecting otherwise. Don’t wander from Casco Viejo’s restored plazas into El Chorrillo next door after dark; it borders the old town closely enough to stumble into by accident. Book your Miraflores entry online the night before if you can, it shaves a genuinely painful queue down to a five-minute walk-in.