Image Gallery

Beyond the Canal was produced by student journalists from Northeastern University who, for one month, embedded throughout the isthmus of Panama. Their work, displayed below, captures the diversity and vibrance of this remarkable transcontinental country.

PANAMA CITY is a colonial metropolis. Home to the oldest settlement on the Pacific coast of the Americas, but also the third-highest concentration of skyscrapers in the western hemisphere, the city’s identity is shifting at a rapid pace.

BARRO COLORADO ISLAND is home to the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, one of the world’s most important research sites. Located inside of Gatun Lake, a manmade body of water created in the path of the Panama Canal, Barro Colorado is made up of one island and five peninsulas.

EMBERÁ PURÚ is a small community of 130 indigenous Emberá who live in Chagres National Park. A handful of similarly sized villages are working together in the park to gain land sovereignty of the region that they already maintain on behalf of the Panamanian government.

PORTOBELO is the secret jewel of the Caribbean, if you ask the locals. For two centuries, one-third of the world’s gold and silver moved through Portobelo’s ports. In the process, the city became a hotbed of piracy and European imperial battles. The region’s Congo culture combines syncretic Afro-Caribbean customs with socio-historic reflections on slavery.

COLÓN was once a thriving city on the Atlantic coast with an economy that paralleled its Pacific counterpart: Panama City. Decades of fiscal and social neglect have transformed the city into an impoverished place, although officials have a new plan to reshape Colón into a major tourist destination.

MAMONí VALLEY PRESERVE is a 12,300-acre plot of reforested jungle in the heart of Panama. The area was established as a nature preserve 20 years ago in order to help fight the deforestation of the Panamanian rainforest by ranchers and to showcase ecotourism as a sustainable economic model.

GUNA YALA is one of Panama’s semi-autonomous, indigenous provinces. Although they are originally from the Colombian mountains, the Guna people have lived mostly on several hundred islands and along the coast of the Atlantic Ocean over the past two centuries. But with rising sea levels and issues of massive overpopulation, the Guna are now moving back to the mainland.