Las Tablas Travel Guide

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Las Tablas is the capital of Los Santos province on the Azuera Peninsula, on the Pacific side of the country. When people talk about "Panamanian culture", they really mean Azuera culture. This is cowboy country, where the people have the lightest skin color and identify most with Panama's Spanish ancestry. You'll see most men walking around wearing dark, pressed pants, lightweight cotton button-down shirts, and real, honest-to-god Panama hats flipped up in front. Outside of Las Tablas, you'll see people actually riding horses around their properties. This land has been deforested for years, so it's very dry and very hot.

Las Tablas has a population of of about 10,000 and is most well known for its Carnaval celebration, which is comparable in Panama to heading to (pre-Katrina) New Orleans for Mardi Gras. I arrived here the day before Carnaval started to find a peaceful, clean, well-kept town with a lovely European-style square in the center and streets coming out from all sides, lined with clothing stores and laundromats and bakeries and grocery stores and restaurants, some with apartments or nice hotels on top. Further out from the square, it gets more residential - single-family homes replace the rows of commercial buildings. When Carnaval started, though, all bets were off and the streets filled with loads of vendors selling beer and various meat-on-stick products (caution: these made some people sick), and revelers along with their trash. The actual parade part of Carnaval (usually 2 or 3 floats going around in a circle around the town square) seems to take a backseat to the general festive gathering atmosphere. During the day, everyone walks around with coolers full of beer and people just get hammered. Kids buy squirt guns and go after Americans and pretty girls. Tanker trucks full of ice-cold water spray the appreciative crowds with fire hoses. Sounds fun, in theory, but the sheer mass of people makes it nearly impossible to move around, and the water collects in nasty trash-filled puddles that you'll want to avoid at all costs in your flip flops. I recommend watching from the periphery.

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