Panama 6 Day Itinerary: Panama City, Canal and San Blas

Start here: the Cathedral, with a stone facade and mother-of-pearl inlay on its towers, sits on Casco Viejo's most photographed square, ringed by restored colonial buildings standing next to others still in ruins. Free entry, set aside 45 minutes including a walk around the square.

Around the square sit the Interoceanic Canal Museum and the Palacio de las Garzas, the presidential palace, guarded by sentries with live herons roaming its courtyard.

A 20-minute stop: the baroque altar of carved, gold-leafed wood is the only one to survive intact through the piracy and fires that destroyed the original Panamá Viejo. The most-told legend says nuns painted it black and told Henry Morgan it was made of plain wood.

A 20-minute stop: only the brick arch and the church facade remain, but the arch is famous for standing unsupported, with no central pillar, since a fire in 1756. American engineers used that stability as evidence for Panama's seismic safety during the early-20th-century debate over where to build the canal.

End the morning here, at the tip of the peninsula: the obelisk and bronze plaques commemorate the more than 20,000 French workers who died of yellow fever and malaria during Ferdinand de Lesseps's failed attempt to build the canal between 1881 and 1889. The old Spanish dungeons below now hold art galleries.

The Paseo de las Bóvedas, on the wall above the square, has the best view of the bay and the modern city's skyline.

Entry costs US$17.22 for foreign visitors; set aside at least 90 minutes: the observation decks sit a few meters from the ships, and the busiest times are usually 9 to 11am and 3 to 5pm. The visitor center has four floors of exhibits and an IMAX theater about the canal's construction.

Every ship pays a transit fee calculated by weight and cargo, which can top US$500,000 for the largest container ships; the lowest fee ever paid was 36 cents, by a swimmer who crossed the canal in 1928.

Entry costs about US$22; set aside 90 minutes: Frank Gehry's building, with its asymmetric colorful roofs, is his only work in Latin America. The eight indoor galleries tell how the Isthmus of Panama formed 3 million years ago and split the Atlantic from the Pacific, reshaping marine life and the planet's climate.

It sits right at the entrance to the Amador Causeway, the natural first stop before walking or biking the rest of it.

Rent a bike for about US$5 an hour at the kiosks by the entrance and ride the 6 km to Flamenco Island: it is flat, has a separate bike lane, and the view of ships anchored waiting their turn for the canal is constant. Set aside 90 minutes for the round trip with stops.

By late afternoon, the seafront restaurants on Naos and Flamenco islands fill up to watch the sunset behind the city's skyscraper skyline.

Entry is free; set aside an hour on the Los Momótides trail, the shortest and easiest of the park's four routes: it climbs to a viewpoint over the bay, the Amador Causeway and the skyscrapers, all just 10 minutes by car from the financial district.

Go right at opening, 6am, while the animals are still active and before the midday heat sets in; sloths, Geoffroy's tamarins and keel-billed toucans show up often.

The tour, sold as a package departing from Panama City (from US$90 per person, about a 45-minute drive to Gamboa), winds through side channels of the canal to isolated islets on Gatún Lake, where howler and capuchin monkeys, isolated since the 1913 flooding, sometimes come down to the water's edge out of curiosity.

The boat ride across the lake also passes close to the large ships crossing the canal, before the tour continues to the Gamboa Rainforest Resort for lunch.

Departure from Panama City is early, around 5am, for a 2.5 to 3-hour 4x4 ride to Cartí, in the Guna Yala indigenous comarca. Bring a physical passport: entry to the comarca is controlled and can be refused without it, and there are no ATMs past this point.

From the port, a 30 to 40-minute boat ride reaches the islands chosen by the booked tour.

The whole day, roughly 10am to 3pm, is spent between two or three white-sand islands run by the Guna people, with free snorkeling over a shallow wreck and a lunch stop of grilled fish served by Guna families themselves. There are no chain hotels or wifi: that disconnection is the point.

Guna women sell molas, hand-embroidered fabric panels with geometric designs recognized by UNESCO as part of the people's cultural heritage; buying directly from them on the islands is cheaper and fairer than buying in Panama City shops.

Set aside 90 minutes: the ruins cover the first European city founded on the Pacific coast of the Americas, in 1519, including the cathedral tower, climbed at no extra cost, with views over the whole site and the modern skyline behind it. The entrance museum uses real artifacts excavated on site to explain daily life before the 1671 attack.

The pirate Henry Morgan sacked and burned the city over several days, and survivors decided to rebuild eight kilometers away, on an isthmus easier to defend: today's Casco Viejo.

A 1-hour lunch stop: buy fresh ceviche at the ground-floor counters, made to order with fish that comes straight off the boats next door, or head up to the second-floor restaurants for a sit-down meal overlooking the port. Corvina, shrimp and octopus are the most common orders.

It is a 10-minute walk from Casco Viejo along the Cinta Costera, the waterfront promenade that wraps around much of the city.

The ferry leaves from the Amador Causeway, takes about an hour and costs around US$20 round trip; set aside the whole day. Restinga Beach, linked to the mainland by a sandbar that appears at low tide, is the most visited, but Playa Honda, on the other side of the village, is usually less crowded.

Taboga was once a stopover for Francisco Pizarro on his way to Peru in 1524 and hosted one of Central America's first banana plantations; today it lives off weekend tourism from Panamanians themselves.

A 30-minute stop in the village center: the plain white facade hides parish records dating back to 1524, making it one of the oldest churches still in use in the Americas. The narrow, car-free streets around it are covered in bougainvillea most of the year.