The built environment of Panama City, Panama, has undergone a transformative change over the past decade. Hundreds of high‐rise residential towers have sprung up in and around its central business district, eliciting comparisons with Singapore, New York and Dubai insofar as journalists, real estate boosters and politicians have associated the increase in tall buildings with a commensurate increase in global status. Concurrently, on the urban periphery, scores of uniform housing estates have been erected to house an upwardly mobile middle class. Triggered by the handover of the Panama Canal and the surrounding Canal Zone in 1999, the city's pronounced building boom has corresponded with the highest rates of economic growth in Latin America. This paper examines the complex factors behind the recent transformation of Panama City from a historical‐morphological perspective. While the drivers of demand for real property were primarily global, the determinants of supply have been highly localized, suggesting that the interface between the global and the local is a fundamental catalyst of changes in the urban landscape.