Panama Real Estate Investment Travel Information


Panama's Holy Week of Semana Santa

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Written by Matt Landau

Thursday, November 01 2007

Holy week in Panama is called Semana Santa: a time the people of the isthmus are supposed to commemorate and enact the suffering of Jesus Christ. Instead though, the week is characterized by a number of amusing components that the juvenile expat in me finds jocular. Among them illegal liquor sales, outrageous beach parties, and KKK parades.

Holy week saw locals flee Panama City, heading for towns in the interior where they'd “observe” the holiday with friends and family. I used this opportunity—this emptiness in an otherwise chaotic city—to walk down all the main streets of Panama City, quite literally in the middle of the road being that no cars could be seen for miles. The feeling of walking in the middle of a highway is like a castle in the sky: a feeling reserved for corny music videos and the COPS TV show, just before the lawbreaker is tackled by several strong men and beat with billy clubs. Even the big streets like Via Espana and Avenida Balboa were completely and utterly calm. It was a strange phenomenon, almost like aliens had arrived and taken everyone but yours truly.

So the government, as they do every year at this time, installed a law that no one could sell or consume alcohol starting on Thursday night. If you know Panamanians, you know that they can't go one holiday without getting polluted. So with my notebook and camera in stow, I went about the city looking for alcoholic radicals—people disobeying the law in search of firewater. I came across several small grocery stores who were selling liquor of choice, transferred from the original bottle into something that looked like a beat gas tank. To transfer the hooch, they used funnels that looked like mini lampshades. This is Panamanian ingenuity at its best: not in the canal but in illegal boozing. I saw a small bar who was serving beer but only out of dark plastic cups. I also drove past a pub where, with all the lights off, a circle of about eight people passed around a jar of canned heat.

If you have been fortunate enough to hit up towns like Coronado or Las Tablas during a Panamanian holiday, you know where I'm going with this. The usually quiet rural plazas and dusty beach back roads transform into downtown Bourbon Street, with drunk girls hanging out of their bikini tops and dizzy guys trying to impress them by jumping off tall objects. Small grocery stores turn into party headquarters, where people with no shoes, no shirts, and no sobriety are welcomed like rock stars in Tallahassee. Folks, there is no sign or indication of anything religious going on here, other than perhaps the small drunk farmer I saw praying to a mail box.

Driving home on the last night of holy week, I was stalled by some sort of parade on Calle 50—an event I figured I might as well get out and watch. I was excited until I saw the first row of parade-goers wearing those pointy KKK conical hats. The black man beside me, upon seeing the clansmen, took off fast down the street and I felt like I should as well. Granted these KKK hats didn't indicate any kind of hatred—rather a century-old Latin culture—but nonetheless, I felt a little bit scared. In case anything got out of hand, I tightened my grip on my SWISS ARMY pocket knife and practiced (in my mind) several lethal fighting movements.

Semana Santa is actually a very relaxing and recuperative experience. There are no car horns piercing ears or people behind which to wait for the water fountain. I met several very interesting people who liked me because I had stocked up on vodka, one which was named Carl who had the IQ of a green peanut. The city was extremely calm and the few establishments that were opened seemed to enjoy, just like me, the slower pace at which things moved. It can be a fun time to venture into the guts of the country and explore, as well as hang out in the city and enjoy the ghost town effect.