Santa Maria is Panama City's country club community - a planned development centered on a Jack Nicklaus golf course with luxury towers, private security, and new construction throughout.
Santa Maria is Panama City's country club community - a planned development centered on a Jack Nicklaus golf course with luxury towers, private security, and new construction throughout. Rent is premium but you get modern buildings, large floor plans, and building amenities that rival boutique hotels. You need a car for everything. The social scene revolves around the golf club and building common areas rather than street life. Popular with affluent Latin American families and corporate expats who've outgrown central Panama City's density. Not for nightlife seekers or budget-watchers - for people who've decided what they want and are willing to drive twenty minutes for everything else.
Country club Panama. Planned community centered on the Santa Maria Golf & Country Club - an 18-hole Jack Nicklaus-designed course surrounded by luxury towers and low-rise residences. Feels like a resort development that people actually live in. Manicured, quiet, homogeneous. The commercial offering is limited but growing - a small plaza with restaurants and services, plus a Riba Smith supermarket. Very different energy from the dense, walkable central neighborhoods.
Tomás plays nine holes three mornings a week. He does not describe himself as a golfer. He describes himself as a person who moved next to a golf course and discovered that walking eighteen holes in the morning fixes something that coffee does not. The club is a four-minute walk from the building lobby. In Punta Pacifica, his morning routine was a treadmill facing a wall.
Alejandra drives to Riba Smith by 8:30 - twelve minutes from the apartment, a straight shot on the approach road. She does the full weekly shop plus anything the housekeeper flagged. The Riba Smith here is newer and less crowded than the El Cangrejo location, which she considers a meaningful quality of life improvement. She is not wrong.
The apartment is a three-bedroom in Ocean House. The view is the golf course on one side and the city skyline on the other. They are paying roughly what they paid for a two-bedroom in Punta Pacifica, but the apartment is fifty percent larger and the building is a decade newer. The HOA is not cheap - $480 a month - but it covers a gym, pool, concierge, and maintenance that actually maintains.
Their social life has reorganized around the golf club. Friday dinners at the club restaurant. Saturday morning scramble with two other couples, one Colombian, one Panamanian. The Panamanian couple introduced them to a lawyer who sorted out their residency paperwork in three weeks. Alejandra says this is how things work in Panama - the golf course is a networking event that nobody calls a networking event.
The downside is distance. When their daughter visits from Miami, she complains that there's nothing to do within walking distance. She's right. The neighborhood has a small plaza with a few restaurants and a pharmacy, and that's approximately it. Dinner in Casco Viejo is a forty-minute Uber. The city feels far away because it is far away.
Alejandra does not miss the city. She did three years of Punta Pacifica traffic and Calle 50 noise. She has a terrace now, with a view of something green, and she can hear birds instead of buses.
She says Santa Maria is where you move when you've already done the Panama City thing and want the next chapter.
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| Unit type | Monthly rent (USD) |
|---|---|
| Studio | $800 – $1,200 |
| 1 Bedroom | $1,100 – $1,800 |
| 2 Bedrooms | $1,600 – $2,800 |
| 3 Bedrooms | $2,200 – $4,000 |
Rent data updated April 2026.
Walk times on this page are estimated from Santa Maria Golf & Country Club. Times will vary a few minutes depending on your exact address.
26 local places mapped in Santa María — cafes, gyms, pharmacies, salons, restaurants, banks, and more. Every name below is a link that opens Google Maps directions directly. One tap from anywhere in the list.
Top-rated on Google within 800m · Last verified April 2026
Walk times estimated from Santa Maria Golf & Country Club. Explore the area in Google Maps