112 years of the Panama Canal

The idea had been circling for four centuries

This wasn't a twentieth-century brainwave. In 1534, Charles V of Spain ordered the first serious survey of a route across the isthmus. The geography was too tempting: at its narrowest, barely 80 kilometres separate the Caribbean from the Pacific.

The trouble is that those 80 kilometres contained a mountain range, a rainforest and two of the deadliest diseases of the age. The Spanish settled for the Camino Real and the Camino de Cruces: mule trains hauling Peruvian silver from one ocean to the other. Panama was a place of passage for centuries before the Canal existed. The Canal only formalised what geography had already decided.

The French disaster (1880-1900)

The first to try was Ferdinand de Lesseps, the engineer behind the Suez Canal. He arrived in 1880 with enormous prestige and one wrong idea: repeat Suez — a sea-level canal, no locks.

Suez crossed a flat desert. Panama meant cutting through the Continental Divide and taming the Chagres river, which in the rainy season turns into a monster. The French worked for twenty years. Yellow fever, malaria and financial collapse finished the project: an estimated 20,000 workers died.

The American construction (1904-1914)

In 1903 Panama and the United States signed the treaty under which Washington took on the work. The following year the US bought the French company's rights and property for $40 million and began digging. The project was finished in ten years at a cost of roughly $387 million in the money of the day.

The Canal Authority sums the challenge up as three problems: engineering, sanitation and organisation. The names attached to solving them are John F. Stevens and Colonel George W. Goethals (engineering and management) and Colonel William C. Gorgas, who took on the health crisis. From 1905, with the anti-mosquito campaign under way, mortality collapsed. Even so, the American era cost around 5,600 lives.

What got built was not a sea-level canal but a hydraulic system: a lock canal that lifts ships 26 metres up to Gatun Lake — at the time the largest dam in the world — carries them across the lake and through the Culebra Cut, and lowers them back down to the other ocean. That change of approach, from the French sea-level plan to a lock canal, is the main reason one attempt failed and the other didn't.

August 15, 1914: the day of the Ancon

At 7:10 in the morning the steamship SS Ancon left the port of Cristobal on the Atlantic side. At 4:50 in the afternoon it reached Balboa on the Pacific. In between it had crossed the Gatun locks, the lake, the Culebra Cut and the Pedro Miguel and Miraflores locks. Nine hours and forty minutes to do what had previously required sailing around an entire continent.

It should have been the story of the year. It wasn't. The First World War had broken out two and a half weeks earlier and Europe was looking elsewhere. The opening of the most ambitious engineering project of its time went almost unnoticed in the international press.

To grasp the scale of the change: before the Canal, New York to San Francisco by sea meant rounding Cape Horn, a voyage that could take up to two months. Today, according to the Canal Authority, the US East Coast to Asia via Panama is about 26 days, against 43 via Cape Horn.

From the Canal Zone to Panamanian sovereignty

This is where the story stops being about engineering and starts being about politics. The 1903 treaty granted the United States a strip of territory — the Canal Zone — that cut the country in half and operated under American law. For decades, a Panamanian crossing his own country effectively entered another one.

That wound defines much of Panama's twentieth century and explains dates everyone here knows: January 9, 1964, when a dispute over flying the Panamanian flag in the Zone ended in deaths and became Martyrs' Day.

The resolution came on September 7, 1977 with the signing of the Torrijos-Carter Treaties at the OAS headquarters in Washington. Panama approved them by referendum on October 23 that year and they entered into force on October 1, 1979, opening a twenty-year transition. From January 1, 1990 the Canal administrator was, for the first time, Panamanian.

On December 31, 1999, at noon, Panama assumed full responsibility for the waterway. It is run by the Panama Canal Authority, an autonomous entity created by the constitution and organised under Law 19 of 1997. If you visit and wonder why the Canal comes up in every conversation, this is the part that matters: it isn't an engineering feat, it's proof the country got its territory back.

The expanded Canal: a second canal on top of the first

In 2007 work began on the largest project since 1914: a third set of locks for ships that couldn't fit through the originals. It opened on June 26, 2016 with the container ship COSCO Shipping Panama transiting the new Agua Clara (Atlantic) and Cocoli (Pacific) locks.

The new chambers measure 427 metres long by 55 wide and 18.3 deep, and each complex has nine water-saving basins that return part of the water from every lockage instead of sending it to sea. That technical-sounding detail is now the Canal's central issue: the waterway runs on fresh rainwater, and the droughts of 2023 and 2024 forced transit cuts.

Hence projects like the Rio Indio lake, designed to secure both the Canal's operation and the water supply for the population. The Canal's future isn't decided by ship size. It's decided by rainfall.

The Canal today, in numbers

The full timeline

How to see all this for yourself

Reading the history is fine; watching a 300-metre ship rise 26 metres in front of you is something else. If you're in Panama, our practical guide has prices, opening hours and the Miraflores vs Agua Clara comparison: how to visit the Panama Canal locks.

Four places from our catalogue we'd start with to understand this story on the ground:

Frequently asked questions