20 Balboas San José Church

San José Church in Panama City's Casco Viejo is most famous for housing the Golden Altar — a baroque retablo that, according to well-documented local tradition, was painted black by a Spanish priest to disguise it from Welsh privateer Henry Morgan during his 1671 sack of Panama. Whether the story is strictly accurate in every detail is debated, but the altar did survive while the original Panama Viejo was razed and the colonial capital relocated entirely to its present site.