The heart of Azuero Peninsula — Panama's folk culture capital where carnival is the most elaborate in Latin America and the pollera dress takes a year to make
Chitré is the capital of Herrera Province on Panama's Azuero Peninsula — the cultural heartland of Panamanian identity, where the pollera (Panama's national dress, a hand-embroidered two-piece garment that takes a skilled seamstress a year or more to complete) originated, and where the country's most elaborate carnivals take place. The Azuero Peninsula is geographically isolated enough to have preserved folk music (mejorana guitar, tamborito drum), dance, and craft traditions that were diluted or lost elsewhere in Panama's rapid modernisation. Chitré's Carnival de Chitré runs for five nights…
The Azuero Peninsula was settled by Spanish colonists from the 16th century onward, and because it was largely bypassed by the major colonial trade routes (which ran through Panama City to the Pacific fleet), it developed a relatively self-sufficient agrarian culture that preserved Andalusian Spanish folk traditions more intact than other regions. The folk music, dance, and dress of Azuero have more in common with 16th-century Andalusia than with any other part of Panama.