REINA
TORRES DE
ARAÚZ
1932-1982
First female Latin
American grantee
of the National
Geographic Society;
helped preserve
Panama’s history
In 1961 an American-owned company
demolished a colonial building called
La Pólvora in a coastal city in Pan-
ama to make room for a highway.
Reina Torres de Araúz, a 29-year-old
anthropologist, was outraged and
complained to Panama’s president,
Roberto Chiari. He listened: Panama
created the National Commission of
Archaeology and Historical Monu-
ments and put Torres de Araúz in
charge of ensuring that important
sites were preserved.
Torres de Araúz was already a well-
known anthropologist and cultural
heritage defender by then. She’d been
tapped to take part in the expedition
to identify the best route through
Panama for the construction of the
Pan-American Highway, which even-
tually would stretch, unofficially in
parts, from Alaska to Chile.
She spent her honeymoon scouting
the road’s path on the Trans-Darien
Expedition, which was documented
by National Geographic. The team left
Panama in a Jeep and a Land Roverand ended up in Colombia four months
later, having completed the first motor-
ized crossing from North to South
America.
Her influence on Panama is deeply
ingrained. She founded the archaeo-
logical research center at the Univer-
sity of Panama, set up scholarships to
encourage students to embark on field
research, and created departments
for Panamanian prehistory, ethnogra-
phy, and cultural anthropology. After
serving as the director of the National
Museum of Panama, she helped open
six museums and an archaeology park.
In 1971 Torres de Araúz became
National Geographic’s first female
Latin American grantee, which gave her
the funding to catalog pre-Columbian
gold artifacts. She successfully pushed
for a law that halted the flow of such
artifacts abroad.
Torres de Araúz died at 49, in 1982,
but her legacy lives on in Panama City,
where a sprawling museum named in
her honor holds 15,000 priceless relics
of Panama’s past.