What the pre-Columbian symbols of Panamá actually mean
A frog, a spiral, a crescent of gold. None of it was decoration. It worked more like vocabulary, worn instead of spoken.
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Stories about the symbols we cast, the peoples who made them first, and what is actually worth carrying home from Panamá.
What to bring home from Panamá (that isn't a fridge magnet)
The canal gets all the postcards. Here is what is actually worth carrying home, and what to leave on the shelf.
The golden frog: a national symbol that vanished from the forest
It is on the lottery tickets, the charms and the national calendar. What nobody mentions is that the real frog has not been seen in the wild for over a decade.
El Dorado was never a city
Spanish expeditions spent two hundred years looking for a golden kingdom that never existed. What the Muisca really had was a lake, a ceremony and one very gold-covered chief. That part was true.