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Home Lifestyle

How Today’s Panama City Is A Completely New Playground

Kathleen Peddicord by Kathleen Peddicord
Jan 18, 2018
in Lifestyle, Panama
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Panama City Skyline Across the water
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But Wait, Panama Said, There’s More…

“Wow… this is a new Panama City. I do not recognize this Panama City…

“I was last here,” my friend from Medellín continued, “seven or eight years ago. I passed through as part of my scouting trip to figure out where in Latin America I wanted to settle.

“I was in Panama City two days maybe, and I wasn’t so impressed. I remember thinking, ah… I can find better than this. And I continued on.

“But this city today is unrecognizable from the place I’ve had in my memory. This is beautiful!”

My friend Joe was in town on business. It’s not uncommon. I know lots of people who live in Medellín and do business in Panama City. For some, it’s a conscious, strategic decision.

Because Medellín is pleasant and lovely… and Panama City is pushing always for growth.

In the eight years we’ve been living here, though, we’ve had front-row seats for this city’s renaissance. And we’ve come to take the transformation we’ve witnessed in real time for granted. My friend Joe’s reaction prompted me to take a fresh look at the city Lief and I call home.

Phase I of the Cinta Costera, the expanded thoroughfare that stretches along the ocean in the heart of downtown Panama City, opened a year after we took up full-time residence. It provided more lanes for traffic and a pedestrian-only area for cycling, jogging, roller blading, etc. Wow, we thought at the time, look what they’ve built…

But the Panamanians were only just getting started at remaking the face of their capital city.

Phase II of the Cinta Costera opened in 2010. Now this green area continued from the center of Panama City to old town Casco Viejo.

But, wait, the Panamanians said, there’s more… and, in 2014, they completed Cinta Costera Phase III, which included a raised highway over the ocean to allow traffic a new route around the Casco Viejo peninsula.

The palm trees, hibiscus, and bougainvillea that were planted as part of Cinta Costera Phase I have grown and flourished. Over the years, more trees and plants have been added, in careful patterns and designs… as well as fountains, basketball courts, a meditation garden, outdoor gym equipment, and open-air art installations.

Meantime, these past eight years, along Avenida Balboa, the main drag through the heart of the city that runs alongside the Cinta Costera, we’ve watched as new hotels have been built and as new restaurants and shops have opened.

These new restaurants and shops are more upscale than their predecessors. Today you can shop for evening wear (should you have the need) in a designer boutique then rest up from your retail binge at a rooftop bar sipping Prosecco al fresco while watching ships queuing for their turns to transit the Panama Canal.

“All of this is new to me,” my friend Joe continued when I took him to my favorite rooftop bar on Avenida Balboa the weekend he visited. “All of this activity in this part of the city… this is so unexpected and so impressive…”

I was interviewed this month by a reporter from Consumer Reports working on an article on what it’s really like, today, in 2016, to retire to Panama.

This country has been heralded (by us and others) as a world’s top retirement haven for many years. Is that still the case, the reporter wondered…

In many ways, Panama is a better choice for retirement today than ever. However, today’s Panama is also much more than that.

First, today, Panama is two very different places. Panama City is a world unto itself, a very different place from the rest of the country. Think of Panama City as Manhattan and the rest of Panama as the rural Midwest.

The rest of the country offers many appealing retirement lifestyle choices… beach, mountain, small town, and village.

Panama City offers a different caliber of lifestyle experience that could suit some in retirement but that makes more sense (great sense) for the digital nomad, the go-getting entrepreneur, and anyone in search of income opportunity. This city is a playground for those embracing a making-money agenda.

That’s precisely the agenda that brought Lief and me to Panama City eight years ago. We didn’t mind that the city was more than a little rough around the edges. We weren’t here for easy living. We were here to build a business.

Today, eight years later, Panama City has evolved around us to offer a much more comfortable, more pleasant, and more well-appointed standard of living.

It took my friend Joe to help me register the metamorphosis.

Kathleen Peddicord

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Kathleen Peddicord

Kathleen Peddicord

Kathleen Peddicord has covered the live, retire, and do business overseas beat for more than 30 years and is considered the world's foremost authority on these subjects. She has traveled to more than 75 countries, invested in real estate in 21, established businesses in 7, renovated historic properties in 6, and educated her children in 4.

Kathleen has moved children, staff, enterprises, household goods, and pets across three continents, from the East Coast of the United States to Waterford, Ireland... then to Paris, France... next to Panama City, where she has based her Live and Invest Overseas business. Most recently, Kathleen and her husband Lief Simon are dividing their time between Panama and Paris.

Kathleen was a partner with Agora Publishing’s International Living group for 23 years. In that capacity, she opened her first office overseas, in Waterford, Ireland, where she managed a staff of up to 30 employees for more than 10 years. Kathleen also opened, staffed, and operated International Living publishing and real estate marketing offices in Panama City, Panama; Granada, Nicaragua; Roatan, Honduras; San Miguel de Allende, Mexico; Quito, Ecuador; and Paris, France.

Kathleen moved on from her role with Agora in 2007 and launched her Live and Invest Overseas group in 2008. In the years since, she has built Live and Invest Overseas into a successful, recognized, and respected multi-million-dollar business that employs a staff of 35 in Panama City and dozens of writers and other resources around the world.

Kathleen has been quoted by The New York Times, Money magazine, MSNBC, Yahoo Finance, the AARP, and beyond. She has appeared often on radio and television (including Bloomberg and CNBC) and speaks regularly on topics to do with living, retiring, investing, and doing business around the world.

In addition to her own daily e-letter, the Overseas Opportunity Letter, with a circulation of more than 300,000 readers, Kathleen writes regularly for U.S. News & World Report and Forbes.

Her newest book, "How to Retire Overseas: Everything You Need to Know to Live Well (for Less) Abroad," published by Penguin Random House, is the culmination of decades of personal experience living and investing around the world.

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