Poolside at the JW Marriott, Panama City

We arrived in Panama City with a pretty simple plan: do nothing for the first afternoon. Just check in, find the pool, and decompress. The JW Marriott made that very easy.

The hotel sits right on the waterfront in Punta Pacífica, and the pool deck is one of those setups that stops you in your tracks. Five pools in total, two of them infinity pools that seem to drop straight off the edge into the Panama City skyline. You walk out there and just… stop for a second. It’s a lot. In a good way.

The Azul Pool Bar handles the drinks, and they do it well. The cocktail menu is exactly what you want in that setting — tropical, rum-forward, cold. We parked ourselves by the infinity edge, ordered a couple of cocktails, and pretty much stayed there for the rest of the afternoon. It would have been irresponsible to do otherwise.

The views from up there are genuinely hard to beat. You’ve got the Pacific on one side and the Panama City skyline on the other — all those towers, the Bridge of the Americas in the distance, container ships making their way toward the canal. Just sitting there with a drink watching all of that move was a perfect way to ease into the trip.

The pool area also serves food — lighter stuff, salads, burgers, that kind of thing — which means there’s really no reason to leave. We found that out pretty quickly.

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What was supposed to be “just a couple of hours” turned into the whole afternoon without either of us noticing or caring.

If you’re staying at the JW Marriott Panama, clear an afternoon and just live at the pool. Take the drinks, take the views, take the fact that nobody needs to be anywhere for a few hours. It’s the kind of afternoon that makes a trip feel like a trip.

JW Marriott Panama
Calle Punta Colón, Punta Pacífica, Panama City
marriott.com