Panama

Panama's religious history begins earlier than almost anywhere on the American mainland: the diocese of Santa Maria la Antigua del Darien, erected in 1513, was the first on the continent, and from Panama City the friars and conquistadors staged south to Peru. The isthmus's indigenous peoples kept their own cosmologies through it all.

The Guna of the eastern islands and forests preserve Bab Igala, the Father's Way, a tradition of chanted origin histories performed by specialists in the gathering house, together with the neles, seers who diagnose illness in the spirit world, and the famous mola textiles whose layered designs carry protective imagery.

The Embera, Wounaan and Ngabe likewise sustain shamanic traditions alongside mission Christianity. The canal brought the world: Antillean labourers established Protestant congregations a century ago, and Panama today holds synagogues, mosques, Hindu temples, a Baha'i house of worship, one of only a handful of its kind, and Chinese temples, all within a state that has been constitutionally secular but culturally Catholic since independence. The late twentieth century added the region's familiar Evangelical surge, and in 2019 Panama City hosted World Youth Day, a reminder that for all its pluralism the isthmus still turns out in Catholic hundreds of thousands.

In the old treasure port of Portobelo, on Panama's Caribbean coast, the church of San Felipe keeps a dark wooden statue of Christ carrying the cross, the Cristo Negro, that has become the centre of one of Latin America's great popular devotions. The image's arrival is told in competing legends, all involving the sea: a ship that could not leave the bay until the crate holding the statue was put ashore, a box washed up after a storm, a cargo refused and abandoned. What is certain is that the devotion is centuries old and that it belongs above all to the Afro Panamanian communities of the coast, descendants of the enslaved and the cimarrones who made the region their refuge.

Every 21 October tens of thousands of pilgrims, the nazarenos, converge on Portobelo, many walking the final kilometres from Sabanitas and some crawling the last stretch, dressed in the purple robes of the Nazarene which they wear in payment of promises made for healing, deliverance or pardon. The statue is carried through the town at night on a swaying platform borne by rotating teams, four steps forward and three back, to brass band dirges, and the festival's mixture of penance, drumming, food and dance has made it a defining expression of Congo coast culture. The Black Christ is petitioned by fishermen, migrants and prisoners alike, a Christ whose colour and coast belong unmistakably to his devotees.