Morgan burned Panama—and the city rebuilt eight kilometres away
Panama City, capital of Panama, holds about 410,000 in the city proper and over 2.1 million in the metro. Pedro Arias Dávila founded it on 15 August 1519 as a springboard to Peru and a treasure transit to Spain’s fairs. Privateer Henry Morgan sacked and burned it on 28 January 1671.
Panama City, often just Panama, is both the seat of government and the most populous city in the country, sitting at the Pacific entrance of the Panama Canal in Panamá Province. The city proper has 410,354 people, Panamá District with its outer corregimientos 1,086,990, and the metropolitan area more than 2,100,000. It is the nation's political and administrative seat and a centre for banking and commerce.
Conquistador Pedro Arias Dávila, known as Pedrarias, founded it on 15 August 1519, making it the fourth-oldest of today's capitals in the Americas. Expeditions left from here to conquer the Inca Empire, and it lay on the trade road to the Nombre de Dios and Portobelo fairs, which handled most of the gold and silver Spain extracted from the Americas. By 1520 Genoese merchants, holding a Spanish concession tied to Genoa's banking role, controlled the port and local commerce, chiefly the slave trade; they and the Spanish also found coconuts that had reached the area from the Philippines before Spanish colonisation.
On 28 January 1671 the privateer Henry Morgan and about 1,400 men looted the town, which then burned. It was formally refounded on 21 January 1673 on a peninsula roughly 8 km to the southwest, the district now called Casco Viejo, while the ruins, Panamá Viejo, are a World Heritage Site and a tourist draw.
The Panama Railroad Company formed a year before the California Gold Rush but ran fully only from 1855; between 1848 and 1869 some 375,000 people crossed the isthmus westward and 225,000 eastward, enriching the city. After independence from Colombia on 3 November 1903, French engineer Philippe Bunau-Varilla, named envoy, negotiated the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty that year, granting the United States a 10-mile strip for the canal in return for $10 million up front, $250,000 a year and a guarantee of Panama's independence. The canal opened in 1914, hailed as a showcase of American engineering, though US control later strained relations.
Source: Panama City
