Nombre de Dios

Fishermen here point out an anchor they say has lain in the shallows since the time of the conquest. The quiet bay it rusts in once loaded an empire's silver, and the village behind it never grew back into a city.

In the treasure system's first century, silver from the South American mines sailed up the Pacific coast to Panama and then rode mule trains over the isthmus, loading at Nombre de Dios onto the fleet bound for Spain. Francis Drake announced himself to history here, sacking the town in 1572 and robbing the silver train itself, and Spain's answer was to move: the fleet shifted to better-defended Portobelo, which replaced Nombre de Dios in 1596, and the old port never regrew. That failure to regrow is now its distinction, because the village endures as one of the oldest continuously populated European settlements in the Americas, jungle at its back and almost nothing between it and its extraordinary past. The visit is as simple as the place: clear-water beaches along the coast, kayaks in the bay, and a boat from the village centre to Playa Damas, 1.5 kilometres of palm-shaded sand.