Panama Culture & Language

Panama’s culture is a meeting of Indigenous, Spanish, Afro-Caribbean and, through the canal, a great many other influences — hybrid forms rather than parallel ones. The tamborito is the clearest example: a Spanish dance carrying African rhythms, themes and movement.

The country is divided into ten provinces and, alongside them, six comarcas — territories populated by Indigenous peoples and administered separately. Seven Indigenous languages are recognised regionally: Guaymí, Buglere, Emberá, Wounaan, Guna, Teribe and Bribri.

Guna Yala, the island comarca on the Caribbean, is governed by its own congress. The mola — Guna for blouse, and now the name for the layered, elaborately stitched panels Guna women make for the front and back of one — is the country’s best-known art form and is protected as Guna collective property.

Afro-Panamanian communities descend both from colonial-era enslaved people and from the West Indian workers who built the railway and the canal, and Caribbean English is still spoken in Colón and Bocas del Toro.

The pollera, a long full dress of white cotton or fine linen using some thirteen yards of material, is the national costume; it came from sixteenth-century Spain and was typical in Panama by the early 1800s. It is worn with the montuno for men at the Christmas parade in Panama City, and Carnival in Las Tablas is the largest festival of the year.

Spanish is the official language. English is fairly widely spoken in Panama City, in business and in tourism — more so than in most of Central America, a legacy of the canal — and Caribbean English persists in Bocas del Toro and Colón.

Indigenous languages including Guna and Ngäbere are spoken in their territories.

Buenas as a shortened all-purpose greeting, por favor, gracias and ¿cuánto vale? cover most situations.