by Kurt Grafton
Today we did something that is quickly becoming one of my favorite parts of living in Panama: we walked without much of an itinerary.
We left Casco View and wandered through the streets around Santa Ana, paying attention to whatever caught our eye rather than trying to reach a particular attraction. Within a few blocks, the neighborhood began telling its own story through aging buildings, tropical vegetation, public monuments, and especially the art painted across walls, storefronts, homes, and entire sides of buildings.
Santa Ana is not polished in the way Casco Viejo can be. There are buildings showing decades of wear alongside explosions of color, newer artwork beside faded paint, and streets where the character can change noticeably within a block or two. That contrast is part of what made the walk interesting. We weren't seeing a curated version of Panama City. We were seeing a neighborhood that people actually live in.
A long yellow wall covered with multiple cartoon-style scenes depicting people, conversation, everyday activity, and neighborhood life. The imagery feels informal and social, giving the street the look of an outdoor illustrated story.
One of the first things that struck me was how naturally the art belongs to the neighborhood. These are not framed pieces separated from daily life. Murals occupy walls beside front doors, shutters, utility wires, storefronts and sidewalks. They become part of the architecture.
That is not entirely accidental. Santa Ana has been the focus of several organized mural initiatives over the years. In 2018, for example, an arts initiative associated with Universidad del Arte Ganexa brought national and international artists into Santa Ana to create works centered on identity, including Panamanian ethnic groups, historical figures, women and children. Then in 2019, the first Panamá Mural Fest brought roughly 30 muralists into Santa Ana and neighboring El Chorrillo with the idea of turning the area into what organizers described as an open-air “route-museum.”
Knowing that changed the way I looked at what was around us. What at first appeared to be a collection of unrelated paintings began to feel more like an ongoing conversation between artists and the neighborhood.
A bright, playful mural featuring stylized neighborhood characters, oversized flowers, and a small street cart. The colors and cartoon-like style give the wall a cheerful, community-centered feel and reflect the everyday life that often becomes part of Santa Ana’s public art.
Some of the work is playful. This mural at a bus stop, with its oversized flowers, street-vendor imagery and bright pinks and blues, immediately caught our attention. I have not been able to verify the individual artist from the image alone, so I would rather leave that attribution open. But visually it feels rooted in everyday street life rather than monumental history. The characters, food and cart imagery give it an almost storybook quality while still belonging completely to the streets around it.
That mix of ordinary life and public art became a recurring theme throughout the walk.
A World Painted on a Wall
A view of the world-map mural showing how it sits within the surrounding Santa Ana neighborhood. The colorful wall contrasts with weathered roofs, older buildings, and dense greenery, giving a stronger sense of how public art is woven into the everyday streetscape.
Then there was the enormous Mapa Mundi mural. From a distance, it dominates the side of the building. Up close, the continents become part of the structure itself, interrupted by windows, doors and the wear that comes from being exposed to the neighborhood rather than protected inside a museum.
This one appears to have a more specific educational purpose. In 2023, a Panama program called “A prender tu mente” announced plans to place educational graffiti and murals in communities considered socially vulnerable. Its first planned installation was in Santa Ana, and the program specifically described a world map painted on a wall as one of its educational concepts. The project was created by television producer Ubaldo Davis with support from Panama's Ministry of Culture, the Panama Canal Authority and Banco Nacional, with the goal of encouraging critical and creative thinking among children and young people.
What I like about it is the idea behind it. A world map in a neighborhood like Santa Ana is more than decoration. It puts the world literally on the wall in front of children who pass it every day. It suggests that the neighborhood may be where you begin, but it does not have to define the limits of what you can imagine.
That resonated with me for obvious reasons. Here we are beginning our own life abroad, walking a Panama City neighborhood while looking at a painting of the world.
Art That Teaches
Not far away was another mural that seemed designed less to decorate than to teach.
An educational mural centered on the importance of water, with a large image of the earth and statistics about how much of the planet’s surface is covered by water and how little is available for human consumption. It is a good example of public art being used not only for decoration, but also to teach.
Across the wall is a large representation of the earth along with messages about water: that roughly 70% of the earth's surface is covered by it, and reminders about how little of the planet's water is actually available for human use.
I have not found reliable attribution for this particular mural, but the message is unmistakably environmental. That also fits a longer tradition of community mural work in Santa Ana. As far back as 2014, the organization Sembrarte was working in the neighborhood with local foundations, using murals and community painting projects to bring color to public spaces while communicating messages about environmental awareness and values. One of the organizers described Panama itself as their canvas.
That gave this mural more context for me. Some of what we were seeing wasn't simply street art for street art's sake. The walls have also been used as classrooms.
Panama Painted Onto Panama
Some murals turned the focus inward—from the world and the environment back toward Panama itself.
A long mural celebrating Panamanian identity through images of Portobelo, Fuerte San Lorenzo, traditional dress, music, coastal landscapes, and national symbols. It reads almost like a painted timeline of Panama’s cultural and historical heritage.
This wall may have been my favorite because there is so much going on in it. One section depicts Portobelo and Fuerte San Lorenzo, while other panels reference traditional Panamanian culture through imagery of the pollera, drums, coastal scenes and other symbols.
The Portobelo and San Lorenzo references connect the mural to a much deeper part of Panama's history. The fortifications on Panama's Caribbean coast were developed largely during the 17th and 18th centuries by the Spanish Crown to protect one of the most important transisthmian trade routes in the Americas. Portobelo became a major Caribbean port through which wealth crossed the isthmus before continuing to Spain, while San Lorenzo guarded the mouth of the Chagres River. UNESCO designated the Portobelo-San Lorenzo fortifications a World Heritage Site in 1980.
Seeing that history painted on an everyday building rather than displayed in a museum made it feel different. The artwork is almost saying: this history belongs here. You walk past a drum, a fort, a traditional dress or a Caribbean scene and are reminded that Panama's identity did not begin with the modern skyline or the Canal.
It is layered.
Indigenous history. Spanish colonial history. Afro-Panamanian history. Caribbean influence. Migration. Trade. The Canal. Modern Panama.
The walls seem to carry pieces of all of it.
Some Art Doesn't Need an Explanation
A vivid nature-themed mural filled with large blue butterflies and tropical leaves. The composition is clean and striking, and the butterflies naturally evoke ideas of transformation, movement, and change, even if the artist’s intended meaning is not known.
And then there are murals that simply stop you because of their color or imagination. The butterfly mural is one of those. Huge blue butterflies surrounded by tropical leaves take over an otherwise ordinary wall. I couldn't verify the artist beyond the web address visible on the artwork, so I wouldn't speculate about its creator or intended symbolism.
But butterflies almost inevitably suggest transformation, and that interpretation felt appropriate to me given where we are in life right now. Whether that was the artist's intention or simply what I brought to it, it was another reminder that viewers become part of the meaning of public art too.
A large, surreal mural dominated by a dark animal form against a vivid pink background, with blue and white shapes moving across the composition. It has a much more contemporary, expressive feel than the educational or cultural murals nearby.
The large pink-and-black animal mural had a completely different energy—less educational, more surreal and contemporary. There appears to be an artist signature in the upper corner, but I can't identify it confidently enough from the photograph to attribute the work. I actually like leaving some of these unanswered for now. Part of exploring the neighborhood over time can be finding out who created them and hearing what the artists intended directly rather than relying on guesses.
Faith on the Walls
A bold graffiti-style mural featuring Christian messages including “Creador del Universo” and “Cristo Vive.” The work combines street-art lettering with explicit expressions of faith, showing how religion also appears as part of the neighborhood’s visual identity.
Religion appears in the street art as well. This wall combines graffiti-style lettering with explicitly Christian messages, including “Creador del Universo” and “Cristo Vive,” along with a reference to John 8:32. Regardless of how one interprets the larger artwork, the religious message is direct.
I found it interesting because the walls of Santa Ana seem to carry almost every dimension of community identity—history, environment, popular culture, education, national identity and faith. This isn't one artistic voice speaking for the neighborhood. It feels much more like many voices occupying the same streets.
Beneath a Tree That Has Seen More Than We Have
A bronze bust of Panamanian poet and journalist Gaspar Octavio Hernández, set beneath a massive tree in a small green space. The monument adds a historical layer to the neighborhood, connecting the streets around it with Panama’s literary and cultural history.
Eventually the murals gave way to something quieter. We came across an enormous tree whose roots, trunk and hanging aerial roots almost seemed to be taking possession of the small park around it. Photographs don't quite communicate the scale. Standing beneath it, the city suddenly felt much older.
Beside it is a bronze bust.. The plaque identifies the figure as Gaspar Octavio Hernández, an important Panamanian poet and journalist. This is the kind of discovery I enjoy most because we weren't looking for a monument to Hernández. We simply walked into it.
And suddenly another piece of Panama was waiting for us to learn about.
That is exactly what I mean when I say I want this blog to be about more than destinations. I don't want to just photograph a statue and move on. I want to know who that person was, why Panama chose to remember him, and what his life tells me about the country I'm living in.
And Then Came a Different Kind of Lesson
Our walk also gave us a reminder that exploring a city requires some awareness. At one point, we were preparing to continue down another street when a police officer in a patrol car stopped and warned us that we probably should not keep going in that direction. She honked and indicated that the area ahead was not somewhere we should be wandering into.
We thanked her and turned around.
There was nothing dramatic about the encounter, and that's actually what I appreciated about it. The officer saw two newcomers walking toward an area she thought we should avoid and took a moment to let us know.
Good to know somebody was watching our backs.
It was also a reminder that when you arrive in a new country, you don't yet understand the invisible boundaries that locals know instinctively. A street may look perfectly ordinary to us while someone who has lived here for years immediately knows that two blocks farther is somewhere we probably don't need to be.
That doesn't make me want to stop exploring. It makes me want to explore more intelligently.
Seeing the Neighborhood Instead of Passing Through It
By the time we returned, I realized we had probably learned more about Santa Ana from hour of walking than we could have learned from several hours of reading about it.
We saw beauty and deterioration occupying the same block. We saw global ideas painted beside very local ones. We saw environmental education, faith, Panamanian history, contemporary street art, cultural pride and simple humor sharing the same neighborhood walls.
And we barely scratched the surface.
This is one of the things I was hoping for when we moved abroad. I don't want to experience Panama solely through the places someone else has already decided are worth seeing. I want to walk down a street because it is there, notice something I don't understand, take a photograph, go home and learn what I was looking at.
Sometimes that will be a famous piece of history.
Sometimes it will be an artist whose name I eventually learn.
Sometimes it will be a fifty-cent pineapple.
And sometimes it will simply be a police officer rolling down his window to tell us, with the wisdom of someone who knows the neighborhood much better than we do, that perhaps today's walk should continue in the other direction.
That's life beyond the itinerary.
