Metropolitan Cathedral Basilica: heir to a cathedral burned in a pirate raid, its towers said to be inlaid with pearl-island mother-of-pearl

In Panama City, the Metropolitan Cathedral of Santa María la Antigua is the institutional heir of the diocese of Santa María la Antigua del Darién, erected in 1513 by Pope Leo X, the first diocese on the American mainland, and of the later cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption at Panama Viejo, built in stone between 1619 and 1626. On 28 January 1671 the forces of the privateer Henry Morgan attacked Panama Viejo. A fire destroyed the cathedral, never rebuilt on that site. Its origin remains disputed among historians: some sources attribute it to Morgan’s men, others to an order by the Spanish governor Juan Pérez de Guzmán to blow up the gunpowder stores to deny the city to the pirates, and contemporary accounts already failed to agree on who was responsible. In 1673 the city was moved to the San Felipe peninsula, today’s Casco Viejo, a more defensible site fortified against future pirate attacks. A provisional wooden structure of 1674 was replaced, from 1688, by the present stone building. Construction proceeded in stages, façade 1688-1741, main body 1741-1762, side towers 1762-1796, until the consecration on 4 April 1796 by Bishop Remigio de la Santa y Ortega, a project of 108 years in all. One source attributes the design to the military engineer Nicolás Rodríguez, though the attribution is not confirmed by the more authoritative sources. The style is described inconsistently as Renaissance, sometimes called “Jesuit”, or as colonial Baroque, probably because the more than one hundred years of construction spanned several stylistic currents. The bell towers are traditionally described as inlaid with mother-of-pearl from the Pearl Islands, the archipelago in the Gulf of Panama. This claim is widely repeated by Panamanian sources, including the archdiocese itself, but it has not been possible to trace it to a primary archival document. The original bells were partly melted in a fire in 1737. A restoration between 2015 and 2019 replaced the bells with eight new ones cast in Spain, and installed a new hand-carved marble altar and a pipe organ of around eight tonnes. The building was declared a national historic monument in 1941 and raised to a minor basilica on 22 December 2014, as announced by Archbishop José Domingo Ulloa Mendieta, in office since 2010 and never made a cardinal. On 27 January 2019, during World Youth Day in Panama, Pope Francis personally consecrated the cathedral’s new altar. According to the archdiocese’s official website, Panama’s independence from Spain was proclaimed from the cathedral steps in 1821, and on 3 November 1903, as reported by Archbishop Ulloa and other sources, the first Te Deum for the separation of the isthmus from Colombia was sung here. These details, though relatively well supported, would merit further independent verification. No damage to or use of the cathedral is documented during the US invasion of December 1989 against the regime of Manuel Noriega, whose refuge was instead the apostolic nunciature, a different building. In the immediate aftermath, however, between February and March 1990, the newly elected president Guillermo Endara held a thirteen-day hunger strike inside the cathedral. He used it as office, meeting room and even bedroom, sleeping on a cot and taking only water and consecrated hosts, to press the US administration to release around a billion dollars of aid promised to Panama after the invasion.