A few Images from Old Panama, Casco Viejo...
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| Plaza de Cathedral - beautifully restored |
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Men at work - Panama style
The roads are ripped open in the old centre, pipes are being replaces and everything is repaved. Clean up from the ground up. |
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| Most streets and alleys in Casco Viejo are roped off with a narrow passage left for pedestrians. Desvios, detours, prevail and the fiew throroughfares open to cares move only inch by inch. |
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| Completed....new street and clean facades, maintaining the old character |
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| Paving almost finished, but the houses are still in grave disrepair |
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| Ruin of an old Dominican Convent, only the outer walls are left. They have been shored up, and the interior has benn converted into a venue for modern sculptural art. |
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| Downtown old Panama, also called San Felipe, the beaches are a stretch of rubble, garbage, dirt and home to huge flocks of ibises. Inthe background construction for a raised highway across the bay, which is goiung to connect the Bridge of the Americas across the Panama Canal to the southern part of Panama, and effectively avoiding downtown traffic jams. |
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| A good number of houses in Casco Viejo look like this - just a facade with holes where windows, balconies and doors used to be - behind it bougainvillae in bloom |
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| A monument to Ferdinand Lesseps, the Frenchman who started building the Panama Canal, but sadly failed. |
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| The 'golden' altar in Iglesia de San Jose...the one Captain Morgan missed in his raid |
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| Old town ruins and rubble, awaiting restauration. Someone painted a mural of a huge rat on the wall in the lower right hand corner...probably the only residents left at this stage... |
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| Shockingly enough, many Panamanians still live in these decrepit buildings, even use balconies, which appear to be on the verge of breaking off their facades. Glimpses into the inerior of some of these houses reveal dark dinghy living spaces where people live in deplorable poverty. |
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| A few blocks down - world class luxury condominions, shopping malls, avenues, parks, shore front restaurants - a haven for expatriates and rich Panamanians alike. |
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| Glass office tower downtown Panama City |
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| During a quick land based detour to Miraflores Lock on the Panama Canal gave a rare glimpse of rafted sailboats leaving the last lock, behind them a giant container carrier. |
Getting ready to transit the Big Ditch, the Panama Canal, from west to east we are anchored off Fuerte Amador, a couple of miles outside Panama City. Fuerte Amador lays at the end of a causeway which joins three small islands together and connects to the mainland. The causeway was constructed from excavated earth from the Panama Canal. Palm lined, with jogging trails and a handful of Miami style marinas and store and restaurant complexes it is a very cosmopolitan outpost of Panama City, whose sky scrapers line the horizon.
Vasco Nunez de Balboa was the first European who sighted the Pacific Ocean from Panama in 1513 - 500 years ago. Instead of being glorified by King Ferdinand of Spain, a jealous Panama Governor Pedro Arias Davila executed Balboa under trumped up charges of treason in 1519.
By 1533 Pizarro conducted a lively if bloody trade of Incan gold over the isthmus of Panama. Some of the gold stayed in Panama, converted into altars and other treasures in churches and private mansions. That was enough to convince Henry Morgan, to sack the city in 1671. One golden altar (located still in a somewhat gold stripped form in the Iglesia de San Jose) escaped the pirate, as the local priest painted the altar black to deceive greedy Captain Morgan. And deceived he was, as he donated some of his loot, to have the apparently ugly church 'fixed up'.
As the city was virtually destroyed by Morgan, the locals built a new one a few miles further west, where present day Panama downtown is located. Casco Viejo, the old town, still exists in a very dilapidated form and is - sadly - home to many poor, who live in these ruins in deplorable conditions.
The old city still retains much of its original architecture as well as many churches and convents, some in ruins. It appears that the whole area is under reconstructions, alleyways and narrow streets are being repaved with red bricks, house by house the decrepit buildings are being restored and 'fixed up'. It is a slow process, which involves dealing with each owner of every buildings one by one, to get the reconstruction underway. Hence Casco Viejo is a mix of ever present road construction, some very attractive repaired colonial buildings as well as some awful hovels behind and inside old ruins, some just being walls without windows, some patched up multi story buildings with terror inspiring cracks and fissures in walls and balconies.
Public areas of the old town are reasonably well maintained - tourists have them on their must see list. Plaza Francia, the Panama Canal Museum, the French Embassy, Plaza Cathedral are all picture postcard attractive.
Outside the limits of Casco Viejo, or San Felipe, as the old part of town is also known, are the impressive glass towers of global businesses, condos of thousands of expatriates taking advantage of a favourable tax environment and relatively low cost of living.
I used the hop-on-hop-off bus to reach the old town, walk around until the oppressive tropical heat reduced me to a gasping thirsty creature, and then rejoined the bus to take a detour to Miraflores Lock on the Panama Canal from land instead of the deck of a ship. There one had the choice between local beers called 'Panama' or 'Balboa' - hard choice.
This was the first time, I have actually seen a raft of sail boats transiting a lock, held in place by long lines in front of an immense container ship. These small ships are placed in front of the larger ships when sharing a lock chamber. It is bad enough to handle the unavoidable turbulence caused by filling and emptying the chamber of millions of gallons of water in a very short time, but the large ships enter and exit under their own power. The violent wash from their props would toss these small nut shells around to the point of crushing them.
