The Best Hotels in Panama City

Sixty rooms tucked into the upper floors of a gleaming mixed-use skyscraper in Obarrio, which tells you something about how Panama City works. Floor-to-ceiling windows frame the rapidly shifting skyline, and the front desk greets arrivals with champagne or cold water, a small gesture that lands well after a long connection. The location puts most of the city within walking distance or a short cab ride, which matters here, where plenty of guests are between somewhere else entirely.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Hotels

The top-floor suite has a foosball table, a sunken tub, and a built-in bar, which tells you most of what you need to know about the W Panama. This sleek business-district hotel sits roughly equidistant between Tocumen airport and Casco Viejo's colonial streets, making it convenient for people who like to have options. White-lacquer rooms, rainfall showers, a rooftop pool, and a cocktail bar that leans into local flavors fill out the rest.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Hotels

A boutique hotel built inside a restored department store in Casco Viejo, the American Trade invented a fictional centuries-old family property and then decorated accordingly: weathered wood, retro tilework, and antique furniture sitting alongside Frette linens and plasma screens. Fifty rooms keeps it intimate without feeling sleepy, and the rooftop pool deck handles the socializing while a jazz program from pianist Danilo Pérez takes shape downstairs.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Hotels

Three historic buildings, a Spanish Colonial wing, a French Colonial wing built by Jesuit priests, and an American-era addition, wrapped around a garden courtyard large enough to make Panama City feel like a rumor. This Casco Antiguo hotel has 88 rooms that manage to feel both antique and modern, with even the standard doubles running spacious. A rooftop pool, a spa, and two restaurants occupy the grandest original spaces, one of them a former chapel.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Hotels

Six suites carved from a lovingly rebuilt 1930s apartment block in Panama City's Casco Viejo, Las Clementinas is a boutique hotel where the floors are rich tropical hardwood and the balconies do all the decorating. Rooms run residential in scale, the kind of generous proportions a developer would have sliced in half. The ground-floor café and bar feeds everyone from hotel guests to locals who know better than to eat elsewhere in the neighborhood.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Hotels