How To Visit The Panama Canal — ALONG DUSTY ROADS

When Do Boats Go Through The Miraflores Locks?

If the thought of visiting the Panama Canal already seems a bit dull to you, then imagine doing it when there isn’t actually a massive ship traversing through.

The narrow series of opening locks and rising levels requires careful, methodical navigation, so boats aren’t constantly streaming or steaming through. When present, for non-practical people like us, they definitely allow a better understanding of the scale of the ships and their Lego-like container stacks, as well as the intricacies and incredibly tight margins involved for the passage of the metal behemoths.

Their process and progress are also glacial, with the time it takes for a single ship to cross much longer than most expect, which means that you are actually only able to see boats at the Miraflores Locks during two distinct daily slots.

Unless you have zero interest in the boats, there’s no point in arriving outwith those windows, and planning around them is arguably the most important thing to know before your visit.

Thankfully, this information comes in the form of ‘The Panama Canal Transit Schedule’.

There’s some old information for this circulating online but, at time of writing, the schedule is:

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Morning | Boats until 9.05am, so you need to arrive just before 8am (guards don’t let cars through until 7.50am)
Afternoon | Boats from 1.40pm, so you have a few hours

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The updated, daily transit schedule is available to view here on the official Panama Canal website, and we highly recommend confirming times before finalising your own plans. It doesn’t matter whether the ship is going north or south.

Now, the problem with the narrow crossing windows at Miraflores is obvious: every tour and most visitors end up arriving at once! This means, unless you’re visiting off-season, it’s always likely to be quite crowded on the observation decks.

The ebb and flow is quite predictable though, and on our visit it was packed at 3pm, but nearly empty by 5pm.

Travel Tip // In hindsight, the tactical approach for the afternoon would be to turn up and watch the movie first, before the transits start. The film adds a level of important understanding of what you’re actually looking at, especially if you have a brain like ours where IKEA shelves getting put together feels like a miracle of construction. Once it’s done, you could then get out and grab prime position for viewing the first transit, before the majority of the crowds arrive.

For the morning, the tactical way is probably to flip it: head straight to the deck after opening, then watch the movie. That way, you may even be able to catch two boat crossings before 10am if the timings work out.