A Traveller's Tale 4: Balboa, Panama City
Over recent weeks in this column I have been telling the story of my journey with my family to the UK and Europe in 1962. My father, Peter Cape was sent by the NZ Broadcasting Corporation to study television production techniques with the BBC in London and bring that knowledge back to New Zealand's fledgling television Broadcasting Corporation. I have drawn on my family's slide collection and my father's diary, as well as my own recollections to recount shipboard life and stopovers. Around the end of March 1962 we embarked as passengers on the Royal Dutch Mail Netherland Line's MS Oranje in Wellington. Our first port of call was Pape'ete, Tahiti in French Polynesia. From there we sailed for Central America where we would stop at Balboa, Panama before passing through the Panama Canal.
We reached Panama and docked at Balboa in early April. We may have hired a car. I don't recall. We certainly took in a number of significant sights and locations during our stopover. I have slides of a car ferry in Balboa which was basically a flat-deck barge bearing eight vehicles. We visited several churches and stopped at the towering statue of Vasco Nunez de Balboa, conquistador and Spanish explorer who crossed the Panama isthmus and found the Pacific Ocean in 1513. In 1962 the city still had much of its Spanish colonial flavour in its architecture and layout. The streets were narrow and, judging from the photographs my father took, there was a sense of well-worn shabbiness, which lent an atmospheric sense of lingering history. Spanish influence was obvious in the scrolled architraves and balustraded balconies that were common on the buildings, which seldom stood more than four storeys tall.
Panama was discovered in 1501 by Rodrigo de Bastida, and Panama City was founded in 1519. Its first governor was Pedro Arias de Avila. Both men were conquistadors. It is of little surprise, then, that the city to became a centre for exploration and transit point for gold and silver from Peru to Spain. The city was pillaged and razed in 1671 by the pirate Henry Morgan and his crew of 1400. Two years later, in 1673, early Panama was rebuilt and fortified. The area known as Casco Viejo dates from that period. We visited the San Filipe precinct and Casco Viejo (the old quarter).
I have slides of white herons under courtyard porticos. Obviously, we visited the Palacio de las Garzas – The Palace of the Herons. This was the presidential palace. In 1922 the herons were accommodated by president Belasario Porras, reputedly at the suggestion of his friend and poet Ricardo Miro – if you can believe Wikipedia. I don't think they paid rent but they did enhance the white masonry.