Panama Trivia
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50 free Panama trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Fifty questions on Panama, the isthmus that joined two continents and split two oceans. The canal gets its due: the French disaster under de Lesseps, the 22,000 dead, Gorgas and the mosquitoes, Gatun Lake, the SS Ancon, the swimmer who paid a 36-cent toll and the 1999 handover. Around it sit Balboa's 1513 crossing, Henry Morgan burning Panama City, the Scottish Darien scheme, the 1903 secession negotiated without a single Panamanian in the room, Torrijos, Noriega and Operation Just Cause. The rest is the Panama beyond the locks: Volcan Baru and its two-ocean view, the roadless Darien Gap, the Guna's molas and the San Blas islands, the pollera, the balboa that is really a dollar, the Colon Free Zone, a country with no army, the Panama Papers, baseball's Mariano Rivera, boxing's Roberto Duran and the awkward truth about Panama hats. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the country, the canal, its cities and its people, and the sentence that establishes it is quoted under each explanation. Works for a pub quiz, a classroom unit on Central America or a cruise-ship transit.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Central American country shares Panama's western border?
Costa Rica
Costa Rica: the border is the longer of Panama's two, and the neighbours jointly protect the cloud forests along it as a single World Heritage park, La Amistad.
Q 02Which Spanish explorer crossed the isthmus in 1513 as the first European to see the Pacific from the Americas?
Vasco Nunez de Balboa
Vasco Nunez de Balboa waded into the surf in full armour to claim the 'South Sea' for Spain; a few years later a rival governor had him tried for treason and beheaded.
Q 03Panama City, founded on the Pacific in 1519, became the launch pad for Spain's conquest of which empire?
The Inca
The Inca: the expeditions that toppled Peru set out from the new port, and for generations afterwards Peruvian gold and silver came back the same way to cross the isthmus by mule train.
Q 04Which privateer sacked the city of Panama in 1671?
Henry Morgan
Henry Morgan struck after England and Spain had made peace, so he was arrested and shipped to London; two years later the king knighted him and sent him back to Jamaica as deputy governor.
Q 05A failed colony on the Isthmus of Panama in 1698 nearly bankrupted which European country?
Scotland
Scotland sank a large share of its capital into the colony, and the ruin it left is often cited as a reason the country accepted union with England a few years later.
Q 06After leaving Spain in 1821, Panama joined which short-lived union led by Simón Bolívar?
Gran Colombia
Gran Colombia broke apart within a decade, though not before Bolívar had chosen the isthmus to host his 1826 congress of the newly freed American republics.
Q 07Which US president sent warships to back Panama's 1903 independence?
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt acted after Bogotá's lawmakers rejected his canal treaty; within weeks the new republic had signed over a ten-mile-wide zone across the isthmus.
Q 08The 1903 treaty granting the US the Canal Zone was signed for Panama by an envoy of what nationality?
French
French: Philippe Bunau-Varilla, an engineer from the failed French canal company, rushed the signing through before a delegation of actual Panamanians could arrive to object.
Q 09Which Frenchman led the doomed first attempt at a Panama canal?
Ferdinand de Lesseps
Ferdinand de Lesseps was a promoter, not an engineer, and held out for a sea-level canal like Suez until work had gone on for six years, though his own engineers had judged it impracticable.
Q 10Which famous engineer was convicted, then cleared, over France's failed Panama canal?
Gustave Eiffel
Gustave Eiffel had agreed to build the canal's locks; France's top appeal court annulled his sentence, but he had already left business and gave his last thirty years to science.
Q 11Colonel William Gorgas enabled US canal construction by attacking which two diseases?
Yellow fever and malaria
Yellow fever and malaria: his 'Gorgas gangs' drained ditches, filmed puddles with oil and fumigated buildings, even emptying the holy-water fonts in churches, to kill the mosquitoes behind both.
Q 12Which US Army engineer took charge of the Panama Canal in 1907 and saw it open?
George Washington Goethals
George Washington Goethals was brought in after two civilian chief engineers had quit in turn, and was handed authority over almost everything in the Canal Zone; he stayed on as its first governor.
Q 13Which event overshadowed the Panama Canal's grand opening?
Q 21Where did Noriega take refuge before surrendering on 3 January 1990?
The Vatican's embassy
The Vatican's embassy sheltered him for ten days while US troops outside blasted rock music at the building; he then gave himself up and was flown to Miami to stand trial for drug trafficking.
Q 22Since 1990, which distinction has Panama shared with only one other Central American country?
No standing military
No standing military: the army that Noriega commanded was disbanded after the 1989 invasion, and a 1994 constitutional change made the ban permanent, leaving police and border units to do the job.
Q 23Panama mints its own coins, but which currency supplies all of its paper money?
The First World War
The First World War broke out just before the canal opened in August 1914, so the planned festivities shrank to a modest local affair, with the steamer Ancon making the official first crossing.
Q 14Ships transiting the canal are lifted about 26 metres to which lake, created by damming the Chagres River?
Gatun Lake
Gatun Lake does more than float ships over the divide: it is the reservoir that works the locks, and each passing ship sends millions of litres of its fresh water out to sea.
Q 15The lowest toll ever paid on the Panama Canal was 36 cents, charged in 1928 to a man who did what?
Swam it
Swam it: travel writer Richard Halliburton covered the canal in stages, and the authorities charged him the way they would a ship, by his tonnage.
Q 16The 1977 Panama Canal treaties are named after Omar Torrijos and which US president?
Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter signed in September 1977, but the Senate took more than six months to approve the treaties; the Canal Zone then ceased to exist in 1979 and the canal itself changed hands on the last day of 1999.
Q 17What did the Panama Canal's 2016 expansion add?
A third lane of bigger locks
A third lane of bigger locks roughly doubled the canal's capacity and gave shipping a new size class, the Neopanamax, built to the largest dimensions the new chambers can take.
Q 18The 1964 riots over flying Panama's flag in the Canal Zone left more than 20 dead and are commemorated as what?
Martyrs' Day
Martyrs' Day, 9 January, is a day of national mourning: the riots began after American students flew their own flag alone at a Canal Zone high school and a Panamanian flag was torn in the scuffle.
Q 19Panama's military strongman Omar Torrijos died in 1981 in what?
A plane crash
A plane crash on 31 July 1981 set off a long struggle for his job: within little more than four years Panama had been through three military commanders and five civilian presidents.
Q 20The December 1989 US invasion that toppled Manuel Noriega was codenamed what?
Operation Just Cause
Operation Just Cause toppled a ruler who had spent decades as a paid informant of the CIA, and who had just annulled an election that the opposition appeared to have won by a wide margin.
The US dollar
The US dollar has circulated at par with Panama's own coinage since 1904; with no notes of its own to print, the country can neither create money nor devalue its currency.
Q 24Decades before the canal, what was built across Panama to carry California Gold Rush traffic?
A railroad
A railroad, opened in 1855, ran roughly where the canal does now; hundreds of thousands of gold seekers crossed the isthmus in those years, and a new Atlantic port grew up at its terminus.
Q 25From the summit of Volcan Baru, Panama's highest point, what can a climber see on a clear day?
The Pacific and the Caribbean
The Pacific and the Caribbean both show from the top when cloud allows, which is not often; it is also one of the few spots in tropical Panama where the temperature falls below freezing.
Q 26The Darien Gap on Panama's southeastern border is the only break in which road system?
The Pan-American Highway
The Pan-American Highway runs from Alaska to the tip of Argentina everywhere but here: the road simply ends at the Panamanian town of Yaviza, and plans to finish it stalled partly over fears of cattle disease spreading north.
Q 27In 2023 more than half a million people crossed the Darien Gap on foot, mostly heading where?
The US-Mexico border
The US-Mexico border was the goal for most of the record 520,000 who crossed that year, more than double the year before; the surge was driven largely by Venezuelans fleeing their country's collapse.
Q 28Panama's isthmus rose from the sea some three million years ago, first allowing what?
Animals walked between the Americas
Animals walked between the Americas: opossums and armadillos headed north while bears, cats and horses went south, and the new land also cut the oceans apart, bending Atlantic currents into today's Gulf Stream.
Q 29At the 2021 Glasgow climate summit, Panama formed an alliance of carbon-negative countries with which two others?
Bhutan and Suriname
Bhutan and Suriname: like Panama they are small, heavily forested nations whose trees absorb more carbon than their economies emit, and the three signed a joint call for outside finance.
Q 30Which UNESCO-listed national park is the largest protected area in Panama?
Darien National Park
Darien National Park covers some 575,000 hectares along almost the whole Colombian border, and it is no empty wilderness: Embera, Wounaan and Guna communities still live inside it.