American Trade Hotel

The American Trade Hotel anchors Plaza Herrera at the heart of Casco Viejo, Panama City's UNESCO-listed colonial quarter, in a grand 1917 neoclassical building that began as the American Trade Developing Company's headquarters and department store. Its revival—a collaboration involving Ace Hotel's design minds and local visionaries Conservatorio—set the template for the Casco's renaissance: high ceilings, patterned encaustic tiles, tropical hardwood, potted palms and an unforced glamour that honours the building's Panamanian and Caribbean crosscurrents.

Rooms are airy and light-flooded, with tall windows over the plaza, the quarter's rooftops or the sea; the best corner suites take the dome of the church of San José in one direction and the Pacific in the other. The lobby functions as the Casco's living room, all day long, and the courtyard pool—rare in the quarter—earns its keep in Panama's heat.

Dinner might be at the hotel's café-restaurant or across the quarter's remarkable restaurant scene, but evenings properly end downstairs at Danilo's Jazz Club, the intimate room founded with Panamanian jazz great Danilo Pérez, whose programming gives the hotel its soul. With the canal, the fish market and the capital's towers all minutes away, this is Panama's most atmospheric urban base.