El Cangrejo is the best place to base yourself in Panama City for a real taste of all this cosmopolitan center has to offer. Other Panama City neighborhoods can be more affordable the area around Via Tocumen, for example , more luxury Punta Pacifica , more historic Casco Viejo , and more scenic certainly if your ideal view is of the water, as El Cangrejo is not oceanfront.
But no other neighborhood in the Panamanian capital has as much personality. It'd be fair to describe all Panama City as multicultural, but nowhere else is the diversity more apparent than in El Cangrejo. This region at the heart of this city is dense with restaurant options from Italian, French, Swiss, Colombian, and Cuban to Lebanese, Chinese, Mexican, Argentine, Panamanian of course, and on and on. Alongside and in between are small, family-owned businesses where the proprietors, again, hail from across the globe.
Enjoying it all is an eclectic expat community, North American, Latin American, European, and Asian, that mingles everywhere and always with their neighbor Panamanians. The expats and travelers in El Cangrejo aren't segregated or separated but fully integrated. El Cangrejo is also Panama City's rowdiest, bawdiest zone.
It could be called the city's Red Light District, though no discrete red lights are required to signal the locations of brothels or other sex-industry businesses. Prostitution is legal in Panama, and El Cangrejo is where the trade is largely focused in the country's capital. This may bother you or be just what you're in the market for. In the case of the latter, know that the Veneto Hotel and surrounding streets are a good place to hang out. If the case of the former, the Veneto and environs might be a good area to avoid.
Don't misunderstand. The sex trade is present in El Cangrejo but not omnipresent or overpowering. In what I would describe as the most interesting and certainly the most walkable neighborhood of Panama City, you have a diverse choice of ways to spend your time. El Cangrejo is dense with nightclubs, pubs, concerts, casinos, cafes, theaters, and restaurants, plus two Spanish-language schools, Spanish Panama and the Bristol Academy, making this an ideal place to base yourself for a few weeks of Spanish immersion study.
