Las Tablas

Las Tablas is a modest agricultural town for fifty weeks of the year and then, for the four days before Ash Wednesday, becomes the epicenter of what many Panamanians will tell you, without much room for debate, is the best Carnival in the country. The rivalry driving it is hyperlocal and completely earnest: Calle Arriba and Calle Abajo, the town’s two central streets, have competed for generations over which can stage the more spectacular parade, the more elaborate float, the more dazzling queen — a competition with real stakes for civic pride and none of the irony that a description like this might suggest.

I came specifically for Carnival, having been warned repeatedly that visiting Las Tablas any other week would show me none of what makes the town special, and the warning was accurate but slightly beside the point — the pollera, Panama’s national dress, reaches its most elaborate form here, hand-embroidered over months by specialists, worn by women who have trained since childhood in the traditional dances performed alongside it. Watching a queen’s float pass, trailed by dozens of dancers in polleras that must have taken a full year to complete, was genuinely one of the more overwhelming cultural spectacles I’ve witnessed anywhere.

The water trucks — enormous tankers that spray the crowds continuously through the hottest hours of the day, a Carnival tradition specific to this part of Panama — turn the whole event into something closer to a joyful, chaotic water fight layered on top of the formal parades, and I was thoroughly soaked within the first twenty minutes without a shred of regret. Outside Carnival week, Las Tablas settles back into being a quiet Azuero market town, worth a stop mainly for its role as a gateway to the region’s beaches and its handful of workshops still producing polleras and traditional straw hats by hand.

When to go: For Carnival, plan around the four days before Ash Wednesday and book accommodation months ahead — the town’s population multiplies many times over during the festival.