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This article briefly reviews the history of Panama City, 500 years after its foundation. It starts from the early indigenous village, to the transitista (function in the global market as a transit country) colonial city founded by Pedrarias Dávila, going through its crisis from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and its return to the transitista function with the railway and the canal, until the present. The article accompanies each stage of the city with its respective phase of literary development, each with its own style and theme.